Earlier this year, I took a three-month sabbatical at the Universidad Catolica (UC) and its extended healthcare institutions in Santiago, Chile, where I was able to make some observations on the implementation of an electronic medical record (EMR) and other eHealth developments that could provide some lessons for similar implementations in Australia.

The Chilean healthcare system is funded under a national health insurance scheme which is sourced by a seven per cent tax on incomes. The system has separated into two main streams of care delivery with public and private components. Care within the private system usually requires supplementary funding from the patient or insurance, and like in Australia, patients may have care in both systems.

Opening up the My Health Record to mobile devices and apps will raise “a world of great opportunities” through new technologies and analytical services that are now reaching an exciting maturity, the secretary of the federal Department of Health (DoH) says.

DoH secretary Martin Bowles told the New York eHealth Collaborative Forum at the New York Academy of Sciences last week that there was a significant role for information technology in the government's health reform plans, from opening up the My Health Record (MyHR, formerly PCEHR) to interact securely with mobile devices to allowing healthcare data collected by the government to be shared through a user friendly portal with technology developers and systems designers.

Care coordination specialist Precedence Health Care has launched a new cloud-based coordinated care platform designed to support plug-in application services and the full continuum of care following its recent acquisition by the primary care division of Sonic Healthcare.

Sonic has purchased 100 per cent of the Melbourne-based company, and it will now form part of Sonic Clinical Services, which also includes other well-known assets such as the Independent Practitioner Network (IPN) of medical centres.

I have just returned from the AMIA scientific meeting with great enthusiasm as to how health professionals can use e-health solutions to improve care provision to patients. Each day since returning I have been looking for opportunities in my own workplace to complete the e-health puzzle.

Today I was reminded just how far we are from completing the puzzle but we must persist as technology can help.

Precision medicine is defined by the US National Institutes of Health as an emerging approach for disease treatment and prevention that takes into account individual variability in genes, environment and lifestyle for each person. The concept is at the heart of a new collaboration announced this week by leading New Zealand health IT vendors Orion Health, Medtech Global and CSC.

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

Summary Care Records: GPs add info
Digital Health News ~ Thomas Meek ~ 02/12/2015

Nearly all of England's GPs are able to write additional information into a patient's Summary Care Record from within their clinical system and more than 80% of SystmOne practices have added codes already.

Care plans shared with InterSystems
Digital Health News ~ Rebecca McBeth ~ 02/12/2015

London's care plan sharing scheme Coordinate My Care has gone live with InterSystems’ HealthShare.

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

$15 million donation may 'change the way suicide prevention is handled in Australia'
ABC News ~ Sophie Scott ~ 03/12/2015

A private donor will give a massive $14.7 million to fund Australia's first evidence-based suicide prevention programs, to be run by the Black Dog Institute.

Speculation Fremantle Hospital intensive care unit to be scaled back next year
ABC News ~ Andrew O'Connor ~ 03/12/2015

Intensive care services at Fremantle Hospital may be scaled back next year, with Fiona Stanley Hospital to take over management of the smaller facility from February.

The $360 million St John of God Midland Public and Private Hospitals have opened on time, on budget and with the minimum of fuss in Perth's east, taking the place of the aged Swan District Hospital and offering new services to the region such as day oncology and a high-dependency coronary care unit.

It will also serve as a testbed for the roll-out of Emerging Systems' EHS clinical information system to other St John of God hospitals around the country and will link to both the national My Health Record (MyHR, formerly PCEHR) and WA Health's internal systems, with secure messaging of discharge summaries to local GPs also high on the priority list.

Orion Health has released version 6.2 of its Rhapsody integration engine, promising simplified workflows and improved performance as well as building on the FHIR capabilities introduced in Rhapsody 6.1.

Orion Health said v6.2 was a long-term release and will be supported for a number of years into the future.

Not-for-profit health IT organisation Patients First is set to launch a secure email platform for the New Zealand healthcare sector that is aimed at preventing data breaches while allowing for informal communication about patients between healthcare professionals.

Called 'hMael' and due to be made available before Christmas, the idea is not to supplant secure messaging but to provide a safe alternative to normal email for informal and ad hoc communication between healthcare workers. The basic system will be free of charge.

Three of the largest IT suppliers to the New Zealand healthcare sector have teamed up to develop what they call a world-leading, integrated, precision medicine solution for the country that would also provide an obvious platform on which to build the recently announced national electronic health record (EHR).

In a joint statement, the three organisations said they will work together to join hospital-level clinical data with primary care data and personal health data, which when linked to genomics, microbiomics, proteomics and other new health information types, will enable a truly personalised healthcare system for New Zealanders.

Tunstall Healthcare is set to release an update of its Find-Me Tunstall Watch – which combines the features of a personal response system, GPS tracker and fall detector all in one – to the Australian and New Zealand markets in time for Christmas.

While the watch was designed to support people living with dementia, it is also suitable for those who want extra reassurance while at home, work or out in the community, as well as people living with a disability or a chronic disease.

Australian-owned medical alarm firm INS LifeGuard has rolled out a converged medical alarm, telehealth and assistive technologies platform through its new LifeGuard SmartHome IP Dialler (IPD) device, featuring a number of optional services aimed at ageing-in-place.

INS LifeGuard's medical alarm service is monitored by experienced nurses and is aimed at people living at home and the independent living and retirement village markets.

A survey of Australian laboratory scientists carried out by information systems vendor InterSystems has found that the quest for cost savings and an increase in automation are driving change in the pathology sector, but for public laboratories at least, current laboratory information systems (LIS) are not up to the task of coping with these changes.

InterSystems, which markets a laboratory module as part of its TrakCare suite and is due to launch what it calls a laboratory business management system (LBMS) early next year, conducted one of its annual surveys of the sector at the Australasian Association of Clinical Biochemists (AACB) conference in Sydney in September.

Orion Health has won a tender to roll out its Rhapsody integration engine as a replacement for the legacy JCAPS-based middleware system used by Queensland Health.

The contract is the first step in an overhaul of Queensland's interoperability requirements, part of the 20-year health ICT strategy outlined by Health Minister Cameron Dick in September.

Standards Australia has launched a new project to develop what it says is the world's first digital hospitals handbook, based on an original proposal from the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services.

The project aims to develop a set of principles and recommendations that inform the design and implementation of digital hospitals, both new and refurbished, including articulating exactly what a digital hospital is.

Rival online appointment booking services HealthEngine and 1stAvailable have both gone to the market recently to raise capital for their growing businesses, with both reporting revenue growth and hailing million-booking milestones in what is still an immature sector.

HealthEngine, which says it is Australia's largest health marketplace, last week celebrated its two millionth booking with a new round of capital raising focused on further growth and expansion.

Clinical and practice management software vendor MedicalDirector is in the final stages of beta testing for its next big release, which will introduce to Australian general practice new functionality that is set to fully digitise and potentially even revolutionise how GPs communicate with governments and the wider health system.

Also due to be offered by the other major GP desktop vendors besides MedicalDirector, the new HealthLink Forms functionality has been developed and rolled out in New Zealand by secure messaging specialist HealthLink.

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

Questions asked about £1bn NHS IT fund
Digital Health News ~ Thomas Meek ~ 26/11/2015

The government’s plan to invest £1 billion in new technology for the NHS in England over the next five years has received a cautious welcome from trade body Tech UK.

Ransomware attacks on med devices a real possibility in 2016
FierceHealthIT ~ Susan D Hall ~ 25/11/2015

Ransomware will come to medical devices or wearables in 2016, Forrester Research predicts in a new report.

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

Victorian govt boosts start-up sector with LaunchVic
Computerworld ~ Rohan Pearce ~ 27/11/2015

LaunchVic will be led by Dr Pradeep Philip, a former secretary of the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services

Deliberate agenda' to denigrate GPs: Primary chief slams govt
Medical Observer ~ Julie Lambert ~ 27/11/2015

Primary Health Care’s new CEO has hit out at a “deliberate agenda” to blame GPs and exaggerate waste to justify reforms of the health system.

A parliamentary committee that has been investigating problems with the operation of ICT services at Perth's Fiona Stanley Hospital (FSH) has called on WA Minister for Health Kim Hames to report to parliament on the roll-out of digital medical records throughout the state, along with the implementation of a closed loop medications management system at FSH and the stability of its paging system.

The committee also recommended that the WA Department of Health add an acknowledgement of receipt function to its Notification and Clinical Summaries (NaCS) application for discharge summaries following the distressing death of one patient, and took a swipe at WA Health for its failure to provide relevant information to the committee on the performance of ICT at the hospital.

The federal government will develop an integrated web-based portal with a single phone line as part of a digital gateway program to help people navigate mental health services, with work to begin this financial year and the gateway progressively rolled out from 2016-17.

As part of its response to the 'Contributing Lives, Thriving Communities' review of mental health programs by the National Mental Health Commission, delivered a year ago, the government will also redirect $350 million per annum in funding for various programs coordinated by the Department of Health to Primary Health Networks (PHNs), which will now be in charge of planning and commissioning mental health services on a regional basis.

The founder of practice and clinical management software vendor Genie Solutions has announced he is stepping down as CEO of the company after 20 years at the helm.

Paul Carr, a doctor who has built the company into the leading software vendor for specialist medical practitioners with an estimated 50 per cent share of the market, said his retirement was part of a long-standing succession plan.

Plans to link the My Aged Care central client record with the My Health Record (MyHR, formerly PCEHR) will be “ratcheted up” following the transfer of the aged care portfolio back to the federal Department of Health, an aged care bureaucrat says.

Fiona Buffinton, group manager of the access, quality and compliance group at the Department of Social Services (DSS), told the Information Technology in Aged Care (ITAC) conference this week that she, along with the rest of DSS's aged care section, are in the process of moving back to DoH and she expected to see more focus on plans to link the two systems.

Aged care clinical care software vendor Health Metrics has signed an agreement with Simavita, maker of an instrumented incontinence assessment application colloquially known as “electronic underpants”, to integrate the system into its eCase electronic care plan solution.

Publicly listed Simavita has been developing its Smart Incontinence System (SIM) over a number of years and is currently rolling it out in North America and Europe. SIM is a wireless sensor technology with associated software that can assess an individual's urinary incontinence condition and help residential aged care facilities to develop an evidence-based incontinence care plan.

Medications management and pharmacy systems specialist Webstercare has taken out the top prize of ICT company of the year at the 2015 Information Technology in Aged Care (ITAC) awards on the Gold Coast for RxMedChart, its computer-generated version of the National Residential Medication Chart (NRMC).

Organisers also took the unusual step of naming two new members of the aged care ICT Hall of Fame in industry luminaries Rod Young and Suri Ramanathan. Mr Young is a former CEO of the Aged Care Association Australia (ACAA) and a member of the Aged Care Industry Information Technology Council (ACIITC). Mr Ramanathan is also a member and former chair of ACIITC.

Telstra Health's subsidiary HealthConnex is working on an iOS version of the new telemonitoring app it has built for the Android-based devices used with its MyCareManager integrated telehealth solution, allowing care providers to create tasks to prompt clients at home to take their medications, do their vital signs measurements, or even feed the dog or put the bins out.

HealthConnex's clinical lead for MyCareManager Carol Towers told the ITAC conference on the Gold Coast today that the app, which works in conjunction with the MyCareManager provider portal, also allows alerts to be sent to the care provider's triage dashboard if the client hasn't responded to the prompts or their observation target ranges are out of the ordinary.

Hills Health Solutions has launched a new home monitoring system for older people that can track deviations from daily routines and potentially prevent adverse incidents, and is also now offering the world first silicon-based arthritis pendant it has developed for people with low manual dexterity to both the hospital and aged care sectors.

Hills signed an agreement with Israeli M2M firm Essence earlier this year for the Care@Home platform, which is able to monitor and intelligently analyse the daily habits and routines of older people living at home and predict and even prevent incidents before they are likely to occur.

The University of Technology Sydney (UTS) is gearing up for the first intake of students in its new Bachelor of Health Science degree, which includes what is thought to be Australia's first major in digital health and analytics.

Offered for the first time at UTS in 2016, the degree seeks to combine an understanding of the humanistic side of healthcare with science through the use of data and technology. It will also offer majors in pharmacology and global health.

The federal government plans to turn the My Health Record into a mobile-capable platform at some stage next year, allowing app developers access to the platform through a set of conformant application programming interfaces (APIs).

The Department of Health's special adviser on eHealth Paul Madden told a national Primary Health Network (PHN) forum in Sydney last week that the government will not be developing apps itself, but will make the platform compatible so app developers can have access to it and begin using the data it contains.

Telstra Health has launched a vendor neutral image and data management service that provides radiologists with the ability to view x-rays, MRIs and other radiology studies regardless of the system used to capture the image.

The service is a hybrid cloud/on-site solution which will see radiology studies transmitted to a centralised storage facility through Telstra's data connectivity links and then managed using the Mach7 vendor neutral archive (VNA) software, provided by Telstra Health’s third-party supplier, 3D Medical.

New Zealand's National Health IT Board will convene the first co-design workshop for its national electronic health record (EHR) and digital hospital blueprint next month, as it seeks to have a design for the EHR finalised by the middle of next year and undertake a survey on hospital electronic medical record (EMR) maturity at the same time.

Health Minister Jonathan Coleman announced at the HINZ conference in Christchurch last month that the government would build a single, national EHR that would draw on existing, regionally based EMRs as part of a move from a best-of-breed model to a “hybrid/best of suite” strategy, as recommended in an independent review he commissioned from Deloitte.

University of Auckland researchers are hoping to recruit 1000 people with types 1 and 2 diabetes to test whether a two-way text message-based self-management program can help manage their condition better between clinic visits and improve glycaemic control.

The Self-Management Support for Blood Glucose or SMS4BG trial is being run by a well-known group of researchers from the university's National Institute for Health Innovation (NIHI) who have already had success with mHealth interventions for smoking cessation.

NZ aged care information service Eldernet has launched a new review system for residential aged care facilities that will allow residents and families to provide feedback on their services.

Eldernet plans to have a nationwide system but has begun with those facilities in the Southern District Health Board region.

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

End of NPfIT in London and the South
Digital Health News ~ Rebecca McBeth ~ 19/11/2015

The National Programme for IT has come to an end in London and the South with the exit of the final trust to deploy Cerner Millennium from the BT data centre.

Apixio launches cognitive computing platform
HealthcareITNews ~ Jessica Davis ~ 19/11/2015

Apixio announced today the release of its new cognitive computing platform, Iris, which it says will bring advanced data insights to healthcare by extracting and analyzing medical data previously trapped in electronic health records.

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

The tech inside Victoria's $1bn cancer care facility
iTNews ~ Andrew Sadauskas ~ 20/11/2015

Using cutting-edge hospital technology to improve the healthcare experience of cancer patients is one of the main objectives in a $50 million IT deployment at a new healthcare and biomedical research facility in Melbourne.

GP business model heading over a cliff, study finds
Medical Observer ~ Julie Lambert ~ 20/11/2015

The traditional style of general practice will plunge over a cliff in a few years if the MBS rebate freeze and current care and payment models remain in place, a report predicts.

Telstra Health is moving into the second phase in the development of the National Telehealth Connection Service (NTCS), which will allow hospitals and external healthcare providers to hook into health-grade telehealth networks through a common platform that also handles scheduling, referrals and clinical document exchange as well as a virtual meeting room for video conferencing.

Telstra Health was contracted last year by the Northern Territory government to begin the first phase of the project, which involved proof-of-concept technical and clinical trials in two Aboriginal communities to build them a private, secure video connection service solely for telehealth.

The Pharmacy Guild of Australia says it will move quickly to implement a real-time monitoring system for over the counter codeine sales following an announcement by the Department of Health to defer a final decision on rescheduling OTC codeine to prescription-only.

Last month, the Department of Health's medicines scheduling delegate made an interim decision to support a proposal to re-schedule combination analgesics and cold and flu remedies from Schedules 2 and 3 (pharmacy and pharmacist-only) to Schedule 4 (prescription-only).

The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) has stepped up its efforts to persuade the federal government not to go ahead with proposed changes to the Practice Incentives Program eHealth incentive (ePIP), which seeks to link payments to uploading and “meaningful use” of the My Health Record (MyHR).

Repeating calls from last month's submission on the Department of Health's discussion paper on changes to the ePIP, RACGP president Frank Jones has written to Health Minister Sussan Ley saying the changes were “misaligned, ill-timed, superficial” and will not support meaningful use or improve patient care and safety.

The National Health Performance Authority has released the first national figures for the 31 newly established Primary Health Network (PHN) areas, showing differences in how frequently people visit GPs and specialists and the average costs per person Medicare paid for these visits.

People living in metropolitan and regional communities see a GP over one and a half times more often than others in Australia, the 2013-2014 data shows.

A Cochrane review has found that structured telephone support and non-invasive telemonitoring of people with heart failure living at home can reduce mortality and hospitalisations, can improve quality of life and is well accepted by patients.

The review, led by Sally Inglis, an associate professor at the Centre for Cardiovascular and Chronic Care at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), looked at 41 studies of either structured telephone support or non-invasive home telemonitoring for people with heart failure, of which 17 were new and 24 had been included in the previous Cochrane review.

Chemotherapy can be delivered to patients in rural settings under the supervision of remote medical oncologists as safely as to their urban counterparts, new research shows.

Researchers led by Sabe Sabesan and Bryan Chan of the Townsville Cancer Centre (TCC) compared the dose intensity and toxicity profiles for patients undergoing chemotherapy at the TCC with those for patients treated at Mt Isa Hospital, who were supervised by the same medical oncologists by video.

Practice management system vendor Medtech Global has launched an app for iOS and Android devices allowing mobile access to the ManageMyHealth patient portal being rolled out in New Zealand.

The app is being offered first to patients of GPs in Wellington's Compass Health primary health organisation (PHO), which has contracted with Medtech to provide the patient portal to all interested general practices in the greater Wellington region.

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

NHS IT needs £8 billion - McKinsey
Digital Health News ~ Thomas Meek ~ 10/11/2015

The NHS needs to spend an additional £7.2 billion to £8.3 billion on digital technology over the next five years in order to achieve savings of between £8.3 billion and £13.7 billion, according to a report by management consultancy firm McKinsey.

22 point plan for NHS digital adoption
Digital Health News ~ Rebecca McBeth ~ 10/11/2015

A high-level report on NHS IT by management consultants McKinsey makes 22 recommendations to drive the adoption of technology and achieve the anticipated productivity gains; many of which have already become policy.

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

Is Apple's iPad Pro a PC and laptop killer?
Sydney Morning Herald ~ Tim Biggs ~ 13/11/2015

Almost comically large and coming at a time when iPads are far from de rigueur for everyday life, the iPad Pro has prompted much head-scratching and scepticism since its announcement in September.

Australians are tech pessimists
The Australian ~ Jennifer Foreshew ~ 13/11/2015

Australian technologists are among the least positive globally when it comes to seeing improvement in the country’s innovation position, a study finds.

The legislation allowing opt-out trials for the PCEHR to proceed next year and for the name of the system to be changed to My Health Record have passed the Senate with the support of Labor and the Greens.

While the Senate community affairs committee held a brief inquiry into concerns over security and privacy with the system and reported its findings this week, the legislation has always had bipartisan support.

The Department of Human Services (DHS) has developed a new video conferencing app that can link up hard of hearing customers with a remote Auslan interpreter when attending a DHS service centre for Medicare, aged care, Centrelink or any other departmental inquiries.

Called Express Plus Connect, the technology is being trialled at 33 departmental sites around the country in partnership with Deaf Services Queensland, which has run an Auslan video remote interpreting (VRI) service called Auslan Connections for some years.

A small study analysing safety risks to patients from errors and workflow disruptions caused by general practice software systems has found that while many of those risks are the same as experienced with paper records, new risks arise that are unique to IT.

These include problems of lost or missing data when transferring historical electronic records to new software packages, delays due to software updates such as monthly PBS or drug database updates, and known problems caused by overloaded drop-down menus, particularly when it comes to mixing up medication brand names.

An independent economic evaluation of proposals to reschedule over the counter (OTC) combination analgesics containing codeine shows that it could cost the federal government up to $316 million a year, while the cost of an alternative real-time monitoring system would be negligible.

The Pharmacy Guild commissioned Canberra-based applied quantitative economic analysis firm Cadence Economics to look into the costs of the proposal, due to be decided by the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) Advisory Committee on Medicines Scheduling this month.

Since its deployment in November 2010, Microsoft’s Kinect technology has been investigated for its potential therapeutic use in motor skill rehabilitation. Kinect’s motion tracking is sufficiently accurate for the task of gauging movements during rehabilitative exercise.

A breakthrough benefit for motor rehabilitation therapy is the technology’s ease of use in the home environment.

Another case of incorrect PBS data being uploaded to the PCEHR has appeared, this time involving six scripts being assigned to the wrong person over a six-month period.

A spokesperson for the Department of Health said the situation was rare, but this is the fourth confirmed case that Pulse+IT is aware of in which incorrect PBS data has been exposed on a consumer's PCEHR.

A Senate committee has recommended that the bill enabling opt-out trials for the PCEHR and a change of name to My Health Record be passed by the upper house.

The Health Legislation Amendment (eHealth) Bill 2015 passed the lower house with bipartisan support last month but it was recommended that the Senate conduct a brief inquiry into some of the privacy and security ramifications of the legislation.

The National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA) plans to spend its last months in operation concentrating on getting the pathology and diagnostic imaging sectors connected to the PCEHR and ensuring its IP is handed over to the new Australian Commission for eHealth (ACeH).

NEHTA's annual report for 2014-2015 shows the not-for-profit corporation had an operating surplus of $5.3 million for the financial year, from revenues of $79.26m and expenditure of $73.94m. It had assets of $77.82m at the end of the $2014-15 financial year, including $70.71m in cash.

According to Pulse+IT's calculations, this brings NEHTA's total funding over 10 years to $979,577,083.

Melbourne-based digital health information provider Health& has partnered with US firm Validic to use its application programming interface (API) capabilities to connect data from fitness and medical devices with the personal electronic health record Health& is building.

Validic is a North Carolina-based start-up that is doing some of the hard yards in developing APIs for the numerous medical and wellness devices now on the market.

Canterbury District Health Board is at the “sharp end” of preparations for the implementation of the South Island Patient Information Care System (SI PICS), with the first go-live at Burwood Hospital expected in the first half of next year.

SI PICS is being developed by the South Island Alliance (SIA) in partnership with Orion Health and will be rolled out to all five DHBs, replacing eight different patient management systems currently in use.

Health Informatics New Zealand (HiNZ) is one of 12 organisations coming together to stage a massive collaborative tech sector conference in Wellington next July.

ITx 2016 is thought to be the largest independent tech-related conference in New Zealand in many years, with more than 1200 delegates expected over three days. The organisers, the Institute of IT Professionals (IITP), said it is also likely to be the largest collaboration that the tech sector has ever seen in New Zealand.

University of Auckland researchers are set to publish new results from a study of the use of healthcare robots in the homes of elderly people living in rural areas, showing that robots may lessen social isolation but also help with the provision of medical care.

The researchers, led by Elizabeth Broadbent from the university's department of psychological medicine and Bruce MacDonald from its department of electrical and computer engineering, have been running a project in association with Gore Health to assess the robots for several years.

St John New Zealand has begun the roll-out of its new electronic patient report form (ePRF) using technology from Irish firm Valentia Technologies, as part of a national move from paper records to an electronic clinical record for ambulance transfers of care.

Valentia's CareMonX ePRF suite went live last month in 60 ambulances in the Hauraki, Coromandel and Waikato districts, with the system to be rolled out to more than 600 vehicles by the end of March next year.

A new centre of research excellence (CoRE) for medical technology has opened at the University of Auckland with funding of $NZ23.6 million over five years.

Officially opened last week by tertiary education minister Steven Joyce, funding for the MedTech CoRE was secured by the Consortium for Medical Device Technologies last year.

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

The long Read
Digital Health News ~ Thomas Meek ~ 05/11/2015

Read Codes are to be phased out across the NHS, and SNOMED CT must be used in primary care systems by the end of 2016 and in all IT systems by spring 2020.

Walgreens goes to Epic for EHR
HealthcareITNews ~ Bernie Monegain ~ 05/11/2015

Walgreens is poised to roll out Epic EHRs in its more than 400 healthcare clinics across the country.

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

Kiwi concussion testing software wins Samsung Springboard
stuff.co.nz ~ Tao Lin ~ 06/11/2015

A Kiwi tech company whose concussion software was used at the Rugby World Cup has won the Samsung Springboard competition.

WA auditors guess govt database passwords on first attempt
iTNews ~ Paris Cowan ~ 06/11/2015

WA’s office of the Auditor General was able to break into two sensitive state government networks by successfully guessing on the first attempt that the passwords for the admin account were ‘password’.

The Health Information Workforce Summit, presented by Health Information Management Association of Australia (HIMAA) in association with the Health Informatics Society of Australia (HISA) and the Australasian College of Health Informatics (ACHI) last week, heard from a variety of sources on the vicissitudes of workforce supply in the health information professions.

The shortage in health information workforce (HIW) was discussed by former HIMAA president Vicki Bennett, who was also the principal researcher on an Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) study of the clinical coder and health information manager (HIM) workforce in 2009.

The health information workforce is facing a drastic shortfall in supply in the face of inconsistent data on demand, a forum on workforce shortages has heard.

The forum, staged during a workforce summit held in Sydney last week, also heard that as many as one in three health facilities in Australia are facing vacancies for clinical coders that they cannot fill, and one in five are facing the same challenge with health information managers (HIM).

Adelaide-based health informatics firm Alcidion Corporation has launched a mobile EMR application called Miya Mobile, which promises to provide clinicians with a consolidated view of their patients' data on the move and at the bedside.

Miya Mobile sits on top of the underlying Miya informatics platform, which is able to extract data from any clinical or administrative system in a hospital, including EMRs, patient administration systems and point-of-care devices. The disparate data sources are then consolidated according to the patients' known clinical risk and the essential data presented to the clinician in one view on an iPad.

No complaints were made to the independent overseer about the PCEHR system or the Healthcare Identifiers (HI) Service in the 2014-15 financial year, although it did receive seven mandatory data breach notifications, mostly concerned with “intertwined” Medicare records, during the period.

The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) has released its annual report into its activities in relation to eHealth for the 2014-15 year in its role as the independent regulator of the privacy aspects of the PCEHR system and HI Service, which it collectively calls the eHealth system.

Auckland-headquartered practice management software vendor Medtech Global is set to expand its presence in the US market for its ManageMyHealth portal technology following the acquisition of the remaining shares in Colorado healthcare cost containment firm ConSova Corporation.

While the price of the acquisition was not disclosed, Medtech Global bought a 51 per cent majority interest in ConSova in 2012 for over $US650,000.

The implementation of Cerner's electronic medications management (EMM) module at Concord Hospital in Sydney picked up the NSW Minister for Health's top award for innovation on Monday, heralding the beginning of the statewide roll-out of EMM in 28 major hospitals over the next few years.

Concord Hospital has been extensively trialling EMM in its aged care wards and began a hospital-wide roll-out in May, completing the project at the Concord Centre for Mental Health in August.

WA Health is still evaluating a tender issued last year for an electronic medical record for the new Perth Children's Hospital (PCH) but plans are still on track for the hospital to open using the BOSSNet scanned medical record as an interim measure.

The $1.2 billion, 298-bed PCH is being constructed at the Queen Elizabeth II Medical Centre in Nedlands to replace the aged Princess Margaret Hospital for Children as the state's tertiary paediatric facility.

The federal government needs to do some big-picture thinking about how the rebadged PCEHR will work with the rest of the health system and to ensure previous mistakes are not repeated if it is to make a success of the national infrastructure, the Australian Healthcare and Hospitals Association (AHHA) says.

The AHHA and the Deeble Institute for Health Policy Research have released a briefing paper on the PCEHR, soon to be renamed the My Health Record, outlining three key implementation concerns that need to be tackled if the system is to gain the confidence of users, particularly in light of moves to an opt-out model.

The Australian Association of Practice Management (AAPM) has come out strongly against proposed changes to the eHealth Practice Incentive Program (ePIP) which would link the payment to 'meaningful use' of the PCEHR, saying the timeframes are far too tight in light of the numerous reviews the government has launched into primary care.

In its submission to the Department of Health's discussion paper on changes to the ePIP, which canvassed linking payments to use of the PCEHR or shared health summary (SHS) upload targets, the AAPM said it fully supports the intent of the discussion paper in terms of promoting the active and meaningful use of the system, to be renamed My Health Record, but that it also has “serious concerns” about the proposed mechanisms.

A Sydney study has shown that the use of structured data quality reports (SDQR) along with feedback sessions can improve the quality of routinely collected data in general practice electronic health records, although the improvements didn't quite meet targets set by the RACGP.

The study, conducted by Jane Taggart, Siaw-Teng Liaw and Hairong Yu of the Centre for Primary Health Care & Equity at the University of NSW, looked at four general practices in south-western Sydney over a 12-month period, with feedback sessions conducted at four, eight and 12 months with practice principals and practice managers.

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

Interview: Tim Kelsey
Digital Health News ~ Rebecca McBeth ~ 29/10/2015

Tim Kelsey believes that things are changing in health and social care, as the sectors face up to what may be their greatest ever financial challenge; and the huge reform agenda required to address it.

NHS 24: £117m IT crashes on go-live
Digital Health News ~ Thomas Meek ~ 29/10/2015

Use of a new, £117 million computer system at Scotland’s NHS 24 was abandoned on Wednesday evening after experiencing significant technical problems the day it went live.

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

If we lose the rugby, there's an app that might help you make it through next week
stuff.co.nz ~ Tom Pullar-Strecker ~ 30/10/2015

If you are sick of hearing about either the Rugby World Cup or the Kardashians then, yes, there is now an app for that.

National telehealth service goes live this weekend
NZ Doctor ~ Cliff Taylor ~ 30/10/2015

A new national 24-hour telehealth service is set to go live on Sunday.

The extra time afforded by the recently announced delay in opening the new Royal Adelaide Hospital (new RAH) may prove a godsend for the roll-out of the planned closed loop medications management system, but may also see the new enterprise pathology system implemented at another hospital first.

A report by the South Australian Auditor-General Andrew Richardson tabled this week has highlighted the complexity of the state's eHealth program, with the difficulties being faced by the troubled Enterprise Patient Administration System (EPAS) and the move from the current building rescheduled to November 2016 having flow-on effects on both the new Enterprise Pathology Laboratory Information System (EPLIS) and plans for a closed loop medications management system.

Healthdirect Australia has launched a new app for iOS and Android devices that combines the health service finder functionality of the National Health Services Directory (NHSD) with a clinically validated symptom checker and trusted health information sourced from Australia's leading health organisations.

The healthdirect app uses GPS to help users locate their nearest general practice, pharmacist or hospital and also displays latitude and longitude coordinates that can be relayed to triple zero in case of emergency. It also shows users the address of the nearest emergency department.

Trials of opt-out models for the PCEHR will begin in Far North Queensland and the Nepean-Blue Mountains region of NSW in early 2016 as part of what the federal government says is an attempt to re-set the agenda when it comes to digital health and innovation.

Federal Health Minister Sussan Ley (pictured earlier this year) told the National Press Club today that the government had committed to continuing with the PCEHR – soon to be renamed the My Health Record (MyHR) – and to the My Aged Care website as part of its new policy of delivering a 21st century government that embraces the digital economy.

Melbourne's Royal Children's Hospital has started the six-month countdown to go-live for its new $48 million electronic medical record, with plans on track to switch on all clinical functionality at the hospital on one day next April and go straight to HIMSS Stage 6, only the second hospital in the country to do so.

In what is the first implementation in Australia of an EMR from giant US vendor Epic, the keenly watched project will see the system go live with all clinical functionality fully implemented, including emergency, OR and anaesthesia, all specialist modules, full medications, orders and results, clinical documentation and scheduling.

The Queensland government has come up with an extra $5.8 million to support the roll-out of the Cerner integrated electronic medical record (ieMR) at Brisbane's Lady Cilento Children's Hospital (LCCH) as part of an overall $70 million three-point plan to try to solve some of the problems affecting the $1.5 billion hospital.

LCCH was plagued by poor planning before it opened in November last year and by bad publicity since, with claims of problems ranging from not enough beds to not enough parking spaces.

Consumers accessed their PCEHR a total of 322,112 times in the 2014-2015 financial year, while healthcare providers viewed records over 50,000 times and uploaded documents over 175,000 times, the PCEHR system operator's annual report shows.

While the report's figures on total consumer and healthcare provider registrations and document uploads have been superseded by more recent figures now being published on the government's eHealth website, the annual report shows that in the 2014-2015 year, 547,164 extra people registered for a PCEHR, bringing the total number to 2,277,010 by June 30, 2015.

The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) is holding an eHealth forum this week in Melbourne in a bid to set a new agenda for general practice IT and information management (IM).

Organised by the college's newly formed RACGP Expert Committee – eHealth and Practice Systems (REC-eHPS), the forum aims to kick-start discussions on the future path for primary care eHealth after years in which the national eHealth agenda has dominated.

The primary care sector in New Zealand is beginning the move from using the UK National Health Service's Read codes to the SNOMED clinical terminology, which will require software vendors to show compliance with the nationally mandated coding system.

Read codes have been used by GP desktop systems in New Zealand since the mid-1990s, having been adapted from the UK, where they were first developed by a general practitioner but are also used in acute care.

Two doctors took out the top prizes in the 2015 Clinicians' Challenge, both receiving an $8000 award to continue the development of their ideas.

The challenge was split into two categories this year, with one prize for a new idea and the other for a project in active development.

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

Record sharing: TPP and Emis integrate
Digital Health News ~ Thomas Meek ~ 21/10/2015

England’s two major GP clinical system suppliers are about to begin trialling a direct integration between their systems to allow GPs to share patient records more easily.

Interoperability across various settings focus of UCSF, Cisco partnership
FierceHealthIT ~ Susan D Hall ~ 22/10/2015

The University of California San Francisco and Cisco have teamed up to create a platform to enable data-sharing from multiple sources among health systems, providers and application vendors.

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

Govt MP call for subsidy for regional diabetes technology
ABC News ~ Lucy Barbour ~ 23/10/2015

Families in regional Australia who have children with type 1 diabetes are pleading with the Federal Health Minister to subsidise life-saving technology.

Broken Hill hospital linked to high-speed medical network
ABC News ~ Declan Gooch ~ 23/10/2015

Broken Hill hospital is set to be connected to a high-speed health network that will allow faster access to electronic medical records.

The federal government is still open to receiving proposals from Primary Health Networks (PHNs) for innovative ideas on boosting consumer and provider participation in the PCEHR under the current opt-in model but has yet to make a final decision on where to hold trials of opt-out alternatives.

Health department officials told a Senate Estimates committee hearing on Wednesday that there was still no final decision on how many trials will take place or where, but up to six may be conducted, of which some will be of opt-out participation and others of “innovative approaches” to opt-in.

Ascom Integrated Wireless has recently deployed its IP-based nurse call solution at Wesley Mission Brisbane and is shortly to announce its first major Australian contract for its new Ascom Myco purpose-built smartphone for healthcare, which is aimed at improving workflow and helping to reduce alarm fatigue for care staff and nurses.

Wesley Mission Brisbane, which has embarked on a mobility strategy for its residential aged care communities that allows nursing staff to access the cloud-based Platinum 5.0 clinical information system from Leecare, has deployed Ascom's IP-based nurse call solution across six facilities.

A commonly voiced fear that patients will become overly persistent emailers and stalk their GPs around the clock if practices introduce patient portals has been dismissed by early research into the technology's use in New Zealand.

Tom Love of health policy and analysis research firm Sapere Research Group told the Health Informatics New Zealand (HiNZ) conference in Christchurch yesterday that as well as dismissing fears about persistent emailers, the research showed that another concern – that patients would start bugging their GPs by emailing questions of a clinical nature – is also somewhat unfounded.

The introduction of an IT platform by the Midlands Health Network that can track a child's health milestones from birth to six has been able to identify over 6000 kids in the Waikato who have missed oral health checks over the last year, potentially saving the district health board millions in the cost of anaesthetising children for tooth extractions.

Midlands Health Network's service manager for child health Bronwen Warren told the Health Informatics New Zealand (HiNZ) conference in Christchurch yesterday that the National Child Health Information Platform (NCHIP) that has been rolled out in the Waikato had also scored some early wins in linking up newborns with GPs, identifying newborns who had missed metabolic screening tests and ensuring children are immunised as close to the schedule as possible.

The New Zealand government has announced plans to build a single, national electronic health record (EHR) for all of its citizens, with a base platform up and running within three years.

It has also outlined plans to introduce a common blueprint for digital hospitals that will measure all hospital and specialist services against the HIMSS electronic medical record adoption model (EMRAM).

Canterbury and West Coast District Health Boards are set to implement a new digital patient observation and alert response system called Patientrack, which is aimed at helping clinicians identify deteriorating patients earlier.

Patientrack was devised by a New Zealand-trained intensive care specialist based in the UK and has been deployed at Central Manchester University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Western Sussex Hospitals NHS Trust. It is distributed in New Zealand and Australia by IT solutions firm MKM Health.

Hawke's Bay District Health Board is the first in New Zealand to deploy the Whanau Tahi Connected Care (WHCC) system to support co-ordinating and commissioning of community services for its over 65 patient population and those with long-term conditions.

Hawke’s Bay DHB’s Need Assessment Services Coordination (NASC) agency commissions community support services each year for thousands of people with disabilities and older people needing age-related support, ranging from household management to personal care and residential care.

Newly launched cloud-based clinical and practice management system Clinic to Cloud (C2C) has added full MIMS integration to its offering, which is aimed predominantly at specialist practices.

C2C is hosted in Microsoft Azure data centres in Sydney and Melbourne and is designed to take care of scheduling, billing and reporting as well as clinical care.

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

New Apple ResearchKit studies target autism, melanoma, epilepsy
mhealth News ~ Eric Wicklund ~ 15/10/2015

ResearchKit's six-month-old universe is expanding again, thanks to three new healthcare projects that make use of the iPhone and Apple Watch.

NHS 24 IT system £41m over budget
Digital Health News ~ Thomas Meek ~ 14/10/2015

A project to implement a new IT system at Scotland’s NHS 24 is now £41.6 million over budget and more than two years behind schedule, according to a report by the Auditor General for Scotland.

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

NBN roll-out timetable detailing 'ambitious' three-year plan released
ABC News ~ Francis Keany ~ 16/10/2015

A new timetable for the National Broadband Network (NBN) is ambitious but achievable, the Federal Government says.

Royal Adelaide Hospital opening: FOI documents cast doubts on new date
ABC News ~ Angelique Donnellan ~ 16/10/2015

Fresh doubts have been cast on the completion date of the new Royal Adelaide Hospital by the South Australian Opposition.

The Australian College of Rural and Remote Medicine (ACRRM) has come out in support of moves by the government to transition from rewarding GPs for connecting to the PCEHR/My Health Record to actually using it, but says meaningful use must be predicated on the creation of a clinically relevant and operational system.

The college also believes that changes to the changes to the eHealth Practice Incentives Program (ePIP) and those outlined in the government's recent legislation discussion paper must be considered in association with the wider policy deliberations about primary care currently taking place.

A bill amending the PCEHR and Healthcare Identifiers Service acts has passed the lower house with bipartisan support and will now be sent to the Senate.

Labor is requesting its upper house colleagues inquire into some of the privacy aspects of the legislation but will not block its passage.

The Australian Medical Association (AMA) has rejected the government's attempt to link eligibility for the eHealth Practice Incentives Program (ePIP) payment to meaningful use of the PCEHR.

Echoing similar arguments made by the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) in its submission on the Department of Health's ePIP discussion paper, the AMA said in its submission that the ePIP was a practice-level payment, not one made to individual practitioners, and that a better way to encourage GPs to participate in the system is to remunerate them through an MBS item or a Service Incentive Payment (SIP).

Sydney's Macquarie University Hospital (MUH) has taken the unusual step of removing a number of best-of-breed clinical software systems after less than five years in operation and installing in their place a unified system based on InterSystems' TrakCare healthcare information solution.

First developed in Australia, TrakCare is built on InterSystems' HealthShare health informatics platform and provides a common user interface for a number of its core systems, including patient record, patient administration, order entry, medications and progress notes, as well as its add-on modules, which include laboratory, pharmacy, emergency department and radiology.