Pulse+IT's weekly round-up of Australian and New Zealand health, IT and eHealth news:

WA Health department IT probe: ex-staff to face no penalties, one now with hospital private contractor
ABC News ~ Jessica Strutt ~ 19/02/2016

Two former Health Department public servants embroiled in findings of massive waste and mismanagement will escape penalty, while one now works for a private contractor on the new Perth Children's Hospital, it has been revealed.

Health board hit by cyberattack
New Zealand Herald ~ Sophie Ryan ~ 19/02/2016

Whanganui District Health Board has been targeted by hackers who infected its computers with a "ransomware" attack.

Two WA Department of Health officers massively exceeded their authorised expenditure limits in giving the go-ahead to changes to a centralised computing contract with Fujitsu that originally was to cost $44.9 million over four years but could end up exceeding $175 million by 2020.

In a damning report delivered yesterday, WA auditor-general Colin Murphy said the contract, first signed in November 2010 with Fujitsu to provide data centres, disaster recovery and capacity planning for WA Health's business requirements, including clinical and non-clinical applications, had seen 79 variations worth $81.4 million added, almost tripling its value in the first four years.

Telstra will continue to invest in its Telstra Health division and other new long-term businesses such as the Tesltra Software Group to allow them to grow in scale, capability and reputation, Telstra said as it released its half-year financial results today, which showed net profit after tax of $2.1 billion.

In what was a relatively quiet period for Telstra Health following a flurry of purchases and investments over the last two years, Telstra reported two small acquisitions and some contract wins, but revenue from the division was not reported.

Listed medical group Primary Health Care has reported good half-yearly results for its MedicalDirector clinical software division but has warned the government that it is exploring co-payments and out-of-pocket charges to make up for pressure on its earnings due to the Medicare rebate freeze and cuts to pathology and imaging incentives.

Total revenue for the period rose to $815.2 million in the six months to December 31, 2015, although profit was down by about $5 million to $50.1m.

Consumers will soon be able to upload a PDF of advance care planning documents to their My Health Record (formerly PCEHR), the Department of Health has confirmed.

Consumers have always been able to add the name of the custodian of their advance care directive or other legal document but the ability to upload a PDF is a new, unexpected development.

The Department of Human Services (DHS) has reported log-on error rates as high as 15 per cent for its much-criticised myGov site and is now looking at how to improve the user experience by potentially removing the use of meaningless but unique numbers (MBUNs), department officials said.

DHS has come under severe criticism for its digital services in the last year, particularly over problems logging in to file tax returns with the ATO and report income for Centrelink. MyGov, which has about 8.6 million registered users and is accessed 200,000 times a day, also provides the gateway for consumers to log on to the My Health Record (PCEHR) and for Medicare transactions.

La Trobe University researchers have partnered with cloud CRM platform developer Salesforce to create a free smartphone app that guides parents through the identification of potential red flag signs of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).

While not intended as a replacement for a professional assessment, the app uses questions drawn from research by behavioural scientist Josephine Barbaro of La Trobe's Olga Tennison Autism Research Centre (OTARC).

Sydney-based health IT consulting firm REND Tech Associates will launch a fully localised version of US EHR vendor eClinicalWorks' cloud-based software for GPs and specialists in the next few months, with a new product aimed at the acute care sector due later in the year.

eClinicalWorks will be one of the first purely cloud-hosted software solutions for GPs in Australia, although there are a number that are also targeting the specialist market.

Consulting firm Sapere Research Group has been contracted to develop the business case for the redevelopment of Dunedin Hospital, which is due for review by the government at the end of the year.

Sapere has been contracted by the Southern Partnership Group, which was established in September 2015 to oversee the redevelopment of the aged hospital. They will draw on the work already undertaken by Southern District Health Board to speed up the redevelopment process, including audits on the condition on existing facilities.

The revised eligibility criteria for the eHealth Practice Incentives Program (ePIP) payments will begin on May 1, with general practices to be formally notified in writing from next month.

As Pulse+IT revealed in January, the federal government has revised one of the five criteria from the previous ePIP to require that general practices show meaningful use of the My Health Record by uploading shared health summaries to the system.

Pulse+IT's weekly weekend round-up of international health IT and eHealth news:

Details of £1.8b tech funding revealed
Digital Health News ~ Rebecca McBeth ~ 09/02/2016

NHS organisations will have access to £1 billion in capital funding and £400 million in revenue to help them become paperless over the next five years.

SCR in outpatients and police rooms
Digital Health News ~ Rebecca McBeth ~ 11/02/2016

Access to NHS Summary Care Records is being extended to scheduled care settings and dedicated medical rooms in police stations.

Pulse+IT's weekly round-up of Australian and New Zealand health, IT and eHealth news:

Department probed on ACFI changes
Australian Ageing Agenda ~ Linda Belardi ~ 12/02/2016

The issuing of $10,800 fines for repeated false claims under the Aged Care Funding Instrument (ACFI) will be a measure of last resort and likely to be used rarely, the Department of Health has said.

Changing names
Pharmacy News ~ Chris Brooker ~ 12/02/2016

Health regulators are moving to update Australia’s “out-of-date” system of medical ingredient names.

The majority of work capacity certificates submitted to Work and Income NZ are now being lodged automatically, eight months after the new system went live.

Social Development Minister Anne Tolley said 72 per cent of all medical certificates for WINZ clients were now being lodged through HealthLink's service, which was launched in July last year.

The government has given the green light to a new, $72 million outpatients facility to be built near Christchurch Hospital.

Spanning five storeys and 10,500sqm, the new building will provide outpatient and other clinical services including endocrinology, ophthalmology and dental.

Deakin University researchers have developed a new computational tool that can automatically evaluate trainee performance when carrying out simulated medical procedures on a mannequin.

The technology, developed by researchers at Deakin’s Centre for Intelligent Systems Research (CISR), is able to act like a second pair of eyes for medical trainers while assessing students’ performance.

The state and territory health departments are planning to fast-track a project to allow reports from hospital pathology labs to be uploaded to the My Health Record, formerly known as the PCEHR.

NT Health CIO Stephen Moo said this was a new initiative agreed to recently by the jurisdictions in association with NEHTA, which may use the Healthcare Identifiers and PCEHR Services (HIPS) technology that has been used to get specialist letters and diagnostic imaging reports into the system from NT hospitals.

Primary Health Networks have been advised to continue to call themselves PHNs in their business transactions as legal action continues over listed medical and diagnostic services company Primary Health Care's attempts to trademark its name.

Department of Health deputy secretary Mark Cormack told a Senate Estimates hearing in Canberra yesterday that the Commonwealth, also on behalf of the states and territories, was contesting Primary's attempt to trademark its name.

The head of the digital payments services taskforce in charge of investigating whether to privatise the Medicare and aged care payment systems was only appointed last month, has not been given any terms of reference and does not know the name of the IT systems used by the Department of Human Services for Medicare transactions.

In an at times fiery Senate community affairs legislation committee hearing today, Department of Health secretary Martin Bowles and digital payments services taskforce lead John Cahill were unable to name the systems used, but Mr Bowles claimed that some were up to 30 years old, they were inefficient and were in need of an upgrade.

The idea of outsourcing the notoriously complex Medicare payments system to a private or overseas vendor with no experience of what has been labelled its “labyrinthine” structures beggars belief, one of Australia's leading authorities on Medicare billings says.

Margaret Faux, founder and principal of Synapse Medical Services, which provides medical administration and billing services to all levels of healthcare, said the complexities of the Medicare system meant there was no private company that could handle its procedures better than the Department of Human Services can.

The federal government is well advanced in moves to outsource the payment systems for the MBS, PBS and aged care services, with a proof of concept trial to begin next year, according to a report in The West Australian.

The newspaper is reporting that the massive privatisation plans – Medicare administers billions in claims and payments every year – will be a big feature of Treasurer Scott Morrison’s budget in May.

American-based cloud EHR vendor eClinicalWorks is set to enter the Australian market, signing with Sydney eHealth consulting firm REND Tech Associates as an authorised partner last month, following the roll-out of its technology in New Zealand.

eClinicalWorks is implementing its technology in New Zealand as part of a global roll-out of its private cloud technology for international optometry retailer Specsavers.

Online appointment booking service HealthEngine has formed a partnership with online jobs platform HealthcareLink to offer medical practices access to HealthcareLink's recruitment and employment services.

HealthcareLink has partnerships with more than 25 healthcare and medical recruitment companies nationally and counts Primary Health Care, Bupa, Queensland Health, Ochre Health and Regis aged care services.

Update: 1stAvailable has issued a statement saying that the deal with Primary Dental involves conducting a trial at one site and subject to the outcome of that, a further roll-out will be considered. This statement was issued after Pulse+IT published the original story.

Online appointments booking service 1stAvailable has signed a commercial agreement with Primary Health Care to integrate its technology across the Primary Dental network.

Primary Dental has 200-odd dentists in 55 sites, and the deal increases 1stAvailable's dental network to 600.

Pulse+IT's weekly weekend round-up of international health IT and eHealth news:

Emis Health opens Web to third parties
Digital Health News ~ Lyn Whitfield ~ 04/06/2016

Emis Health has announced an update to its Emis Web clinical system that will allow it to interoperate with any third party supplier conforming to a published set of open application interfaces.

NHS 24 admits IT "systemic failure"
Digital Health News ~ Lyn Whitfield ~ 04/02/2016

A frank report to the Scottish Government’s Public Audit Committee has admitted that “systemic failure” is responsible for the ongoing failure to introduce new IT to the NHS 24 service.

The new Australian Digital Health Agency being set up to take over from NEHTA will be subject to the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act, the Department of Health tells Pulse+IT.

Unlike its predecessor, which was set up as public company and not subject to FOI, the new agency has been established as a body corporate.

Bendigo Health has chosen InterSystems' TrakCare as its electronic medical record (EMR) and clinical information system for the new $630 million Bendigo Hospital, set to open early next year, with the full roll-out of TrakCare due at the end of 2017.

The Bendigo Hospital project is the largest regional hospital development in Victoria involving a new hospital with 372 inpatient beds, 72 same-day acute beds, an 80-bed integrated psychiatric inpatient unit including a five-bed mother-and-baby unit and 11 operating theatres.

The private hospital groups that have been funded by NEHTA to connect to the My Health Record system are all using the Healthcare Identifiers and PCEHR Services (HIPS) middleware developed by South Australian firm Chamonix, NEHTA has confirmed.

NEHTA first announced it would provide funding for private hospitals to connect to the system under its Private Hospitals PCEHR Rapid Implementation Program in November 2014.

The 670,000 or so consumers living within the boundaries of the North Queensland Primary Health Network (PHN) will receive a letter in the middle of March informing them that they're about to get a My Health Record created for them from the information held by Medicare.

Those who want to opt out of the system will have until May 27 to inform the PHN, but for those that want one, their records will be created and online by mid-June, and accessible by healthcare providers in mid-July.

Auckland-headquartered health system integrator HealthLink has officially announced the arrival in Australia of its SmartForms solution, a standards-based technology that is integrated within the major general practice desktop systems and is set to revolutionise the workflow of GPs.

Already in use throughout NZ, the SmartForms technology promises to massively streamline the completion and submission of forms such as medical certificates, health insurance forms and the bureaucratic paperwork that is the bane of the existence of many GPs, as well as making electronic referrals to hospitals, specialists, allied health and population screening organisations quick and easy.

The federal Department of Health is meeting with general practice groups this week to discuss the design of a webform through which GPs can electronically refer patients to the My Aged Care system.

The RACGP was incensed last year when the My Aged Care referrals system went live without the ability for GPs to make an electronic referral from within their desktop software or send it using a secure messaging service. Instead, they were asked to fill in a form and fax it or phone the contact centre.

The Adelaide-headquartered IT consultancy that first developed the Healthcare Identifiers and PCEHR Services (HIPS) technology that has been used to connect public and private hospitals to the My Health Record has developed a new mobile app for the system that is about to be trialled in the field by hospital clinicians.

Chamonix, which has offices in Darwin, Brisbane and Melbourne as well as Adelaide, has flown under the radar somewhat despite being contracted by NEHTA to develop HIPS, a piece of middleware that has been used by the majority of states and territories to hook up their hospitals to the national system, back in 2013.

HIPS has also been used by five private hospital groups to connect their facilities, and is available as an open source version for vendors not yet compliant with the system to get on board.

The University of Queensland has won a grant to trial a new app for people recovering from mild stroke that measures their “life space” so their rehabilitation needs can be improved.

Louise Gustafsson, an associate professor with UQ's School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, has received a $50,000 grant from the National Stroke Foundation to trial the app, part of wider project involving researchers at the Metro North Hospital and Health Service, Griffith University and the Australian Catholic University.

Health solutions firm Unified Healthcare Group (UHG) has won a contract with work injury insurance provider ReturnToWorkSA to use its medEbridge eForms technology to securely transmit work capacity certificates from within GP desktop software.

UHG has partnered with Telstra Health to use its secure messaging service Argus to submit the forms electronically, and has agreements with practice management software vendors Best Practice (Bp) and MedicalDirector (MD) to integrate medEbridge with their clinical systems.

A new examination of previously published data on consumer and provider attitudes towards the PCEHR, now known as the My Health Record, suggests that positive beliefs about the value of having a PCEHR and the importance of individual control over the privacy and content of the record are the two key factors that will shape the future of the system.

The new analysis is based on data collected before the system went live, which showed that a slight majority of consumers appeared ambivalent or negative about the PCEHR, views that the researchers argue might stem from not knowing the mechanics of the system very well.

Pulse+IT's weekly weekend round-up of international health IT and eHealth news:

Time for a patient-driven health information economy?
New England Journal of Medicine ~ Kenneth Mandl and Isaac Kohane ~ 21/01/2016

As patients strive to manage their own health and illnesses, many wonder how to get a copy of their health data to share with their physicians, load into apps, donate to researchers, link to their genomic data, or have on hand just in case.

Epic tops Best in KLAS awards for 6th year
Healthcare IT News ~ Mike Milliard ~ 28/01/2016

For the sixth straight year, Epic has secured the top spot for Overall Software Suite in the Best in KLAS: Software & Services report, which is compiled based on feedback from healthcare providers.

Pulse+IT's weekly round-up of Australian and New Zealand health, IT and eHealth news:

Troubled myGov website to be taken from Human Services and given to Digital Transformation Office for streamlining
Canberra Times ~ Noel Towell ~ 28/01/2016

The federal government's troubled myGov website is set to be taken over by the Prime Minister's pet public service project the Digital Transformation Office.

Hospital performance getting worse and now facing budgetary 'black hole', says AMA
Sydney Morning Herald ~ Harriet Alexander ~ 28/01/2016

The Australian Medical Association is warning of an imminent crisis for public hospitals unless funding is increased.

There is still no clear evidence as to how the Qbot virus entered the Melbourne Health network and disrupted some of Royal Melbourne Hospital's systems, but it appears to be able to infect PCs running any version of Windows, the organisation says.

The worm first attacked Royal Melbourne a fortnight ago, forcing the hospital to temporarily abandon some of its clinical systems and institute manual work-arounds, particularly in pathology. Pulse+IT understands this is the second virus to bring down the pathology department in the last six months.

As Pulse+IT revealed last week, the culprit turned out to have been a Qbot or Qakbot worm, which is known to affect older Windows operating systems, in particular XP.

Taranaki District Health Board has rolled out Datix version 14, the first of the five Midland DHBs to implement the patient safety and risk management software that is set to be deployed on a shared platform across the region.

Datix is a modular system for healthcare risk management and incident and adverse event reporting and is used by 75 per cent of National Health Service facilities in the UK. It has also been implemented in South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania.

The Queensland government has launched a $35 million innovation fund to support integrated care projects with the aim of providing more targeted services to patients.

Queensland Health Minister Cameron Dick said hospital and health services would compete for funding based on how innovative their ideas were, how well they supported partnerships and their potential to make a significant difference to the community.

Melbourne's Global Health has signed a contract with Perth-based not-for-profit 360 Health + Community to implement its MasterCare suite and ReferralNet secure messaging solution.

360 Health + Community is a contracted service provider to all three of WA's primary health networks (PHNs), providing services such as mental health, chronic disease management, case management, GP after-hours, inpatient and community services.

The federally funded Decision Assist project is set to release an app for nurses working in residential aged care, community care and general practice to help better care for patients in the final stages of their life.

Decision Assist launched the palliAGED app for GPs last year with the aim of using technology to make information more accessible to GPs at the point of care.

The Pharmacy Guild has moved quickly to prepare for a large-scale pilot of its new real-time monitoring system to help combat the misuse of over-the-counter (OTC) medicines containing codeine.

As reported last October, the Guild's IT arm GuildLink has developed a prototype real-time monitoring and clinical decision support tool that will allow pharmacists to review recent purchases by patients from other pharmacies.

Healthcare technology vendors Jayex and Alcidion have both successfully completed their transitions from private companies to publicly listed firms, with Jayex Healthcare listing on the Australian stock exchange in late December and Alcidion set to do so today.

Adelaide-based Alcidion has undergone a reverse listing, following approval by shareholders of resources exploration company Naracoota Resources to transition from a gold and copper exploration company to a health informatics technology business.

Orion Health has won contracts to provide care coordination technology in association with Accenture and CSC in Paris and Burgundy, the first venture for the Auckland-based company into France.

Orion Health is participating in two projects under the French Ministry of Health's Digital Care Regions (TSN, or Territoires de Soins Numériques) program, part of France's shift from a hospital-centric model of care to a patient-centric model.

Federal Department of Health officials and representatives from project evaluation firm Siggins Miller will visit Cairns and Mareeba later this week to talk to local primary healthcare providers and community members about the opt-out My Health Record trial set to begin in a couple of months, as applications for the position managing the trial roll-out close.

Northern Queensland is one of two sites chosen to trial an opt-out version of the My Health Record, formerly known as the PCEHR. The area includes over 670,000 people who will have a record created for them unless they choose not to.

Five extra sites have been selected to join the Western NSW integrated care demonstrator project, part of the state government's four-year, $120 million strategy to improve connections between primary and secondary care through the use of tools like electronic shared care plans.

The towns of Blayney, Lightning Ridge, Mudgee, Coonamble and Walgett will begin to implement the strategy in the first half of this year, joining five other towns that have been involved since 2014.

Health insurer HCF has bought a 15 per cent stake in Tasmanian telehealth service GP2U, joining Sonic Healthcare as a major investor in the company.

HCF plans to run a pilot program to scale the service to its membership, the company said, with an emphasis on servicing people living in regional and rural areas.

Pulse+IT's weekly weekend round-up of international health IT and eHealth news:

Epic, athenahealth, other EHR vendors sign on for Carequality Interoperability Framework
Healthcare IT News ~ Mike Milliard ~ 21/01/2016

Barely a month after its launch, the Carequality Interoperability Framework devised by The Sequoia Project has already signed up five health IT heavy-hitters to be the first to implement its data exchange principles: athenahealth, eClinicalWorks, Epic, NextGen Healthcare and Surescripts.

No smartcard' Spine apps on way: HSCIC
Digital Health News ~ Rebecca McBeth ~ 21/01/2016

NHS staff will soon be able to get mobile access to the NHS Spine without the use of a smartcard.

Pulse+IT's weekly round-up of Australian and New Zealand health, IT and eHealth news:

Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Centre to open with vacant floor
Herald Sun ~ Evonne Madden ~ 22/01/2016

A range of biotechnology, pharmaceutical and information technology companies, as well as medical research institutions, are now vying for the 13th-floor lease.

Hack attack on a hospital IT system highlights the risk of still running Windows XP
The Conversation ~ Robert Merkel ~ 21/01/2016

A virus attack on the computer system of one of Melbourne’s largest hospital networks is cause for concern because it affected machines running Microsoft’s Windows XP, an operating system no longer supported by the software giant.

NSW Health has teamed up with the Australian Computer Society (ACS) to offer internships to undergraduate students in architecture and cyber security in healthcare, based at eHealth NSW's headquarters in Sydney's Chatswood.

eHealth NSW chief information security officer Gilbert Verdian said the partnership was aimed at fast-tracking career paths to get people interested in the area, which was in the headlines this week with the widely publicised viral attack on Royal Melbourne Hospital.

The federal departments of Health and Human Services, along with the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) and the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission, have been named as government agencies that have applied for warrantless access to telecommunications metadata under the government's controversial data retention laws.

On Monday, Sydney-based technologist Geordie Guy released the results of a Freedom of Information request that listed 61 government agencies that had applied for ongoing access to telecommunications data.

General practice software specialist Best Practice (Bp) has rebranded its clinical and management modules as 'Bp Premier' as it gets set to launch a major update to its medical software in Australia, dubbed the Lava release, and sets its sights on a product launch for the New Zealand market.

The Lava release will include the highly anticipated Aduro SmartForms technology from HealthLink, which is also being rolled out by rival MedicalDirector.

Update: Royal Melbourne Hospital is reimaging all of its PCs running Windows XP after it was discovered that the bug that infected its systems on the weekend is a new variant of the Qbot or Qakbot worm, a known piece of malware that exploits a security vulnerability in XP.

A source at Royal Melbourne told Pulse+IT that the malware particularly affected the pathology department, where the majority of PCs run on XP and the laboratory information system runs on Windows Server 2003.

Medical and scientific publisher Elsevier has launched ClinicalKey for Nursing, a clinical search engine built on the same platform as its current ClinicalKey product but designed to best suit the search behaviours and content preferences of nurses.

Elsevier launched ClinicalKey several years ago and it now counts 80 per cent of academic institutions in Australia as subscribers. Public hospitals in three states are also subscribers, including Queensland Health’s state-wide Clinical Knowledge Network. In New Zealand, Counties Manukau and Waikato district health boards also have access.

Melbourne Health has confirmed that a virus has infected some of the computer systems at Royal Melbourne Hospital, severely affecting the transmission of pathology results.

The Age newspaper broke the story on Monday, reporting that a virus had infected computers still running on Windows XP, support for which ended in April 2014.

Melbourne Health has since issued a statement saying the virus was under control.

Publicly listed clinical software and secure messaging service provider Global Health has had a good start to the new year, announcing last week a new contract with Adelaide Primary Health Network (PHN) for the company's MasterCare shared electronic medical record (EMR) and a five-year, $3 million contract signed with ACT Health just before Christmas.

And while it may be “affidavits at 10 paces” in the dispute with SA Health over the continued use of Global Health's legacy Chiron patient administration system in a number of rural hospitals, Global Health CEO Mathew Cherian has cause to be more optimistic this year as the company continues to target PHNs and area-based mental health services with the MasterCare suite and ReferralNet, and hospitals with its enhanced Patient Administration System (ePAS).

Nine general practices signed up to the first tranche in a new Health Care Homes program being rolled out in Wellington, Porirua and Kapiti that aims to provide easier access to GPs and reduce hospital admissions for people with long-term conditions.

Expressions of interest in the program were opened last October, with nine practices signed up by December. The program, developed by Capital & Coast DHB in partnership with the Compass Health, Cosine, Well Health and Ora Toa primary health organisations (PHOs), is expected to cover up to 185,000 patients. Capital & Coast DHB has invested $6 million in the trial and the PHOs $2m.

Pulse+IT's weekly weekend round-up of international health IT and eHealth news:

HIMSS' survey of EHR value seems a bit misleading
FierceEMR ~ Marla Durben Hirsch ~ 13/01/2016

I've lamented before about the sometimes self serving, misleading or simply unhelpful studies that have been propagated about electronic health records.

Prescribing tool opens up GP data
Digital Health News ~ Rebecca McBeth ~ 14/01/2016

A new online tool allows people to quickly analyse and respond to the huge GP prescribing datasets released monthly by the Health and Social Care Information Centre.

Pulse+IT's weekly round-up of Australian and New Zealand health, IT and eHealth news:

New WA health minister should have single portfolio, medical professionals, Opposition say
ABC News ~ Jessica Strutt ~ 14/01/2016

Medical professionals and the State Opposition are calling for WA's new health minister to only be given responsibility for that one portfolio, as part of a Cabinet reshuffle flagged by Premier Colin Barnett for March.

Practices to lose thousands if GPs don't create PCEHR summaries
Australian Doctor ~ Paul Smith ~ 14/01/2016

Practices will lose their entire e-health Practice Incentive Program payment if their GPs refuse to upload shared health summaries to the PCEHR, the Federal Department of Health has confirmed.

The long-delayed “refresh” of the 2008 National eHealth Strategy may finally see the light of day this year, with the Department of Health declaring it will be tabled for COAG health ministerial agreement early in 2016.

The 10-year strategy was first developed by Deloitte in 2008 to set out a roadmap for four major streams of eHealth activity, including foundations, solutions, change and adoption, and governance. The “refresh” or review of the strategy was commissioned by the health ministers in 2011, with Deloitte again contracted to carry it out.

Sydney's St George Hospital is using the Spok Mobile secure smartphone messaging app to send radiology test results directly to the requesting doctor's smartphone as well as to the hospital's EMR.

The Spok Mobile app is able to encrypt messages from the hospital's radiology information system (RIS) and send them to the requesting clinician.

The new government body set to take charge of the national eHealth sector is likely to be known as the Australian Digital Health Agency rather than the expected name of the Australian Commission for Electronic Health (ACeH).

The ACeH name was first recommended in the December 2013 Royle review into the PCEHR, which also recommended that that system be renamed the My Health Record (MyHR).

General practices wishing to continue to receive payments under the eHealth Practice Incentives Program (ePIP) will need to upload a small number of shared health summaries to the My Health Record system beginning in May this year, with a broader “tiered” performance-based approach to follow later in the year.

According to a December 24 email from the Department of Health, general practices will be required to upload a shared health summary for 0.5 per cent of the practice’s standardised whole patient equivalent (SWPE) to be eligible for the ePIP payment.

All hospitals, community health centres and administration facilities in NSW will be connected to the state's Health Wide Area Network (HWAN) early this year, according to an update to the state's rural health plan, with the rural electronic medical record program on track for completion by October.

According to the NSW rural health plan progress report 2015, published last week, in addition to the Cerner EMR, the roll-out of the new Community Health and Outpatient Care (CHOC) system and the establishment of satellite hubs for the Non-Emergency Patient Transport Strategy for rural areas will also be completed this year.

SA Health will go live with its troublesome Enterprise Patient Administration System (EPAS) at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (TQEH) in June as part of yet another revised roll-out schedule, with confirmation it is also set to go live at the new Royal Adelaide Hospital (RAH) when it opens in November.

SA Health Minister Jack Snelling announced just before Christmas that EPAS would be “operational” at TQEH in June with the delay in the construction of the new RAH allowing more time to have it ready for the new opening date for the state's flagship facility.

The federal government's newly launched Digital Transformation Office (DTO) has developed a program that it says will enable it to begin to transform key public services in just 20 weeks, and has chosen Medicare enrolments and improved outpatients bookings in Canberra as two of the first projects.

The DTO was set up by then communications minister Malcolm Turnbull in May last year with a grant of $95.4 million. The idea is to ensure that all new and redesigned government services are simpler and easier to use and can be completed from start to finish online.

It may have launched to controversy and infuriated some quarters in the medical fraternity but the new online medical certificate business Dr Sicknote has also proven to be popular with the general public since its launch early last month.

The Melbourne-headquartered business reports that it has had 10,000 unique visitors to its website and has written over 100 medical certificates so far, which it says is a good result considering it coincides with the holiday period, generally a quiet time for sick note composition.

The newly appointed chief information officer of eHealth Queensland has been stood aside after less than three weeks in the job following a complaint about alleged nepotism.

The Courier Mail reported on Saturday that eHealth Queensland CEO/CIO Colin McCririck and Queensland Health deputy director-general of corporate services Sussan Middleditch had been stood down by Queensland Health director-general Michael Walsh.

The announcement by Health Minister Jonathan Coleman at the HiNZ conference in Christchurch that New Zealand would build and roll out the basics of a national electronic health record (EHR) by 2018 was big news on both sides of the Tasman in October, and helped to round off a year in which NZ continued on its steady, sensible path towards a health system supported by sound, functioning health IT initiatives.

The general consensus of opinion from Pulse+IT's informal survey at HiNZ of reaction to the announcement was that if there was one country that was at the right level of maturity and would do the job with the minimum of fuss, it was New Zealand. Unlike certain other countries that shall remain nameless, there were no large sums of money thrown around and no exaggerated promises of what could be achieved.

The announcement that New Zealand will create a national electronic health record (EHR) for all of its citizens was unsurprisingly the most-read Kiwi story on Pulse+IT in 2015. It's also very apparent that anything to do with Orion Health is of real interest to readers, which again is no surprise.

Patient portals were of interest, as were new developments from GP desktop market leader Medtech, and the growing interest in telehealth also became apparent. Australian company Best Practice's unexpected decision to buy Hamilton firm Houston Medical raised some eyebrows, as did the demise of Auckland's HSAGlobal.

Leading health IT vendors Sysmex and Simpl have expressed interest in working with the three foundation members of the recently announced precision medicine collaborative, along with international players such as HP, IBM and Microsoft.

Orion Health, Medtech and CSC announced a fortnight ago that they were teaming up to build a platform for precision medicine by joining up hospital-level clinical data with primary care and personal health data to develop a new model of healthcare for the country.

Health Minister Jonathan Coleman has highlighted the benefits to telehealth of the government's rural broadband initiative (RBI), which has succeeded in hooking up all rural public hospitals and integrated family health centres to high speed broadband.

The 39 facilities were identified by district health boards as candidates for the RBI and are now all able to connect to fibre capable of peak speeds of at least 100 Mbps.

New Zealand has launched a revision of its 2011 national cyber security strategy, which will now include an annual action plan to keep pace with emerging threats and the establishment of a CERT, or computer emergency response team.

Communications Minister Amy Adams said there were growing threats to the economy from cyber intrusions with serious implications for national security.

The summer season for eHealth and health IT kicked off with a tip that the membership of a committee charged with paving the way for the creation of a new digital health agency was set to be announced. The establishment of an Australian Commission for eHealth (ACeH) was a recommendation by the Royle review into the PCEHR and the suggestion was supported warmly by the government.

A week later we received a list containing what turned out to be close to the full committee make-up from well-placed sources, and while the minister's office stayed shtum, we published the names of five of them. Those tips turned out to be spot on and the government announced the full list for the grandly named Implementation Taskforce Steering Committee three days later.

The emergence of HL7's FHIR standard proved a popular topic for Pulse+IT readers this year, joining perennial favourites such as the PCEHR, primary health networks/Medicare Locals and the Telstra Health juggernaut with several entries in the top 20 most-read stories.

Any news on three particular hospitals – Perth's Fiona Stanley, St Stephen's at Hervey Bay and the new and old Royal Adelaide – also drew in the eyeballs, for reasons both good and bad.

July got off to a bright start with the go-live of the electronic referral and central client record aspects of the My Aged Care (MAC) system, or so it would seem. Some early teething problems became quickly apparent as an underestimation by the Department of Human Services (DHS) of demand for the system caused a backlog of referrals, and a failure to consult GPs on how they'd like to use the system caused an explosion of complaints.

These petered out quickly enough after a month or two but they may have been behind the decision to delay adding aged care assessment teams (ACATs) to the assessor portal until next February. In the meantime, the aged care industry continued to call for a link to be established between the MAC and the PCEHR systems.

A series of errors by a pharmacist has been blamed for incorrect data about six prescriptions appearing on one consumer's My Health Record last month.

The consumer contacted Pulse+IT after finding six scripts that were not prescribed for her in the Pharmaceutical Benefits report section of her My Health Record (MyHR, formerly PCEHR). The section receives an automatic feed of new dispensed prescriptions for that patient from the PBS.

As the industry awaited the government's belated response to the Royle review 18 months after it had been delivered, and its subsequent decision on the future of the PCEHR, NEHTA and the new Primary Health Networks (PHNs), April dawned with some big news and some pointers to developing sagas that would keep us interested in the coming year.

One of the biggest announcements came on April 1, when the federal Department of Health announced it was dumping IBM as its prime ICT infrastructure and support services contractor after 15 years. Pulse+IT doesn't usually cover non-clinical, back-office stories like this one, but the awarding of the five-year, $242 million contract to New Zealand-owned IT services provider Datacom came as a bit of an eyebrow-raiser.

Adelaide-based health informatics firm Alcidion Corporation is looking to move from a project-oriented business to a product-oriented company based on its Miya informatics platform as it awaits the go-ahead of shareholders in reverse listing partner Naracoorte Resources next week.

Alcidion and Naracoorte signed an agreement in August in which the resources company proposed to acquire Alicidion before re-quoting on the stock exchange as the Alcidion Group, divesting itself of its minerals exploration interests and concentrating on the health IT business.

It was a bright and shiny new minister who ushered in a bright and shiny new year for the eHealth and health IT industry in 2015, with the albatross around the neck of the previous minister that was the GP co-pay finally dislodged and the new one able to start afresh.

Sussan Ley then proceeded to spend the year on a magical mystery tour – better known in Canberra circles as “wide-ranging consultations with stakeholders” – racking up five or six wide-ranging reviews over the course of her travels. Whether any actual decisions are made or policies are developed based on the results of these reviews before the next election arrives is still to be seen, but health does look to be, yet again, a fertile ground for battling ideologies.

As most of the review work on eHealth policy had been set in train by Ms Ley's unfortunate predecessor, it was mainly left to her to announce in the May budget a very large amount of money for the ongoing operation of the PCEHR and a change of name to the more palatable My Health Record. NEHTA is set to go but the PCEHR will stay for another round.

A new approach to telehealth using data analysis to identify patients who might be suitable for a remote consultation rather than a face-to-face visit at Perth's Fiona Stanley Hospital (FSH) has been so successful it is now being rolled out statewide.

The new method involves delving into the data to find rural patients who have outpatient appointments in upcoming weeks, and actively engaging with their clinicians to determine if they are clinically appropriate for telehealth.

Pulse+IT's weekly weekend round-up of international health IT and eHealth news:

Interoperability: Government officials make plans for 2016
FierceHealthIT ~ Katie Dvorak ~ 09/12/2015

When it comes to secure health information exchange, all eyes are on 2016. At an event Tuesday hosted by the Bipartisan Policy Committee, government officials spoke of their interoperability plans for the coming year.

MOD extends CGI records contract
Digital Health News ~ Thomas Meek ~ 10/12/2015

Te Ministry of Defence has extended its contract with CGI to provide an integrated electronic health record service for the UK’s armed forces.

Pulse+IT's weekly round-up of Australian and New Zealand health, IT and eHealth news:

Google Nest, Apple Pay, holograms, robots and connected homes lead us to the future
The Australian ~ Chris Griffith ~ 10/12/2015

Holograms, virtual reality and augmented reality will be growth areas for tech next year. In general, we will see technology that already is embraced by some become more refined and widely adopted.

Health funding and terrorism on COAG agenda
ABC News ~ Naomi Woodley ~ 11/12/2015

State and territory leaders say they're united in the need for the Commonwealth to reverse cuts to long-term health funding.

Healthcare self-service solutions and patient flow management firm Jayex will list on the Australian stock exchange next week having raised its target of $8 million, and is now set to proceed with the purchase of its UK arm and build what it calls an end-to-end healthcare service delivery system for both the acute and primary care settings.

On board the company is Sonic Healthcare founder Michael Boyd, who will act as executive chairman of what will become Jayex Healthcare, along with Jayex CEO Rob Mantel and Rosemary and Gordon Cooper, founders of the Appointuit online appointment booking system that Jayex acquired in September.

Orion Health has launched a new big health data platform called Amadeus to support its move into precision medicine, based on its Open Platform for population health.

Amadeus combines Orion Health’s data integration capabilities with technologies such as Apache's Cassandra open source database management system, Apache's Spark big data processing engine and ElasticSearch, an open source search and analytics engine.

Diagnostic imaging reports from the Northern Territory are now being uploaded to the My Health Record (MyHR, formerly PCEHR) as consumer registrations for the system reach the landmark figure of 2.5 million, three and a half years after it went into operation.

Over 2000 diagnostic imaging reports in CDA format have been uploaded since the functionality went live at the end of October, Department of Health statistics show. The NT is also contributing specialist letters – over 7000 since that functionality was enabled in April – as well as emergency department and inpatient discharge summaries.

Most Australian and New Zealand GPs are more than happy with their practice management systems but the majority still struggle to communicate electronically with patients and healthcare providers outside their practice, an international poll has found.

And while they believe their practices are well prepared to manage the care of patients with multiple chronic conditions, that confidence begins to decline when it comes to patients who may need more multi-disciplinary care coordination, including patients who need palliative care, who have dementia, who need long-term home care or care in the community, and those with severe mental health or substance misuse problems.

The CSIRO and the National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA) have signed a licensing agreement to make tools for implementing and using clinical terminologies such as SNOMED more freely available.

The tools include CSIRO's Ontoserver, a terminology server that provides a means of querying, searching, filtering and ranking SNOMED CT AU and other standard clinical terminologies.

Several major eHealth NSW IT projects are running behind schedule, including the statewide roll-out of the MetaVision ICU system, Cerner's Community Health and Outpatient Care (CHOC) EMR extension and the new incident management and rostering systems, but in many cases the estimated benefits have been revised upwards.

Acting auditor-general Tony Whitfield tabled a financial audit of NSW Health today that shows that of the nine major IT projects worth more than $20m that eHealth NSW is currently managing, six are running behind the original timeframes but all seem to be within budget.

Finnish aged care software firm Raisoft has signed a non-exclusive licence with the University of Queensland for its CeGA Online web-based geriatric assessment and clinical decision support system.

Designed by researchers from UQ’s Centre for Research in Geriatric Medicine (CRGM) in association with the Centre for Online Health (COH), CeGA Online supports comprehensive assessments of frail older patients in the acute care setting, including acute geriatric wards and geriatric consultations in general wards.