Paul Carr retires as CEO of Genie Solutions

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.

Dr Carr will remain with Genie as chairman of the board but will no longer be involved in the day to day running of the company.

The new CEO will be Emma Macek, who has most recently been national support manager for the company.

“Genie has grown far beyond my wildest dreams and Emma has been an integral part of Genie’s success,” Dr Carr said. “We are supported by so many fabulous staff, a new CEO was always going to come from within the company.

“Emma has been with us for 11 years. She has a deep knowledge of the program and has trained most of our current staff. In order to maintain the great culture at Genie, Emma was the natural successor.”

Genie Solutions is privately owned by Paul and Robyn Carr and Dr Carr’s brothers, Justin and John. They will continue in their respective roles as deputy CIO and CFO.

In addition to dominating the specialist market, Genie is also used by GPs and has built a popular following among doctors who use Macs. The software is also compatible with Microsoft operating systems.

ITAC 2015: Connection on the cards for My Aged Care and My Health Record

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 was separated from the former Department of Health and Ageing (DoHA) after the 2013 election and made part of DSS. Following the ministerial reshuffle after Malcolm Turnbull deposed former prime minister Tony Abbott in September, Health Minister Sussan Ley successfully lobbied for aged care to return to its traditional home.

Ms Buffinton said the aged care sector could expect to see a long-term strategy developed next year to build on the move to consumer-directed care (CDC) first introduced as part of the former Labor government’s landmark Living Longer Living Better (LLLB) reforms. This will include a vision for the My Aged Care system and its links to MyHR.

“Living Longer Living Better gave a five-year vision, which means 2016 was as far forward as we were looking,” Ms Buffinton said.

“The government has been talking with the sector over the last couple of months, leading into 2016, of what is next, what is the next long-term view. Originally we were looking at the next five years but … the government doesn’t just dole out [residential aged care] places now. It is a consumer-directed world and it is far more of a marketplace.

“To have more certainty we need more of a 10-year vision and the government has heard that. In 2016, you will be hearing more about that vision of up to 2025.”

A major part of the LLLB policy, the My Aged Care system was designed to be a one-stop shop for all of the needs of older people moving into the Commonwealth-funded aged care system as well as some services provided by the private sector.

The My Aged Care website went live initially with basic information on options for accessing assistance for older people as well as details of residential aged care facilities and home care service providers.

Accommodation prices were added last year, and on July 1 this year, the system went live with a new central client record and electronic assessments and referrals.

However, things did not go smoothly, with a backlog of referrals jamming the system and some GPs infuriated by the inability to make an electronic referral directly from their desktop software.

Special arrangements have been made to allow healthcare providers to continue to use fax machines for referrals for the time being, although there have always been plans to digitise the process through some sort of eForm.

“On the first of July with My Aged Care I got this inundation of correspondence from the college of general practitioners and others saying why can’t my desktop talk to My Aged Care,” Ms Buffinton said.

“Sometimes it is the economic problem of unlimited wants and finite resources. That’s not to say we don’t believe it will happen, but it is a case that it wasn’t going to happen on the first of July.”

Ms Buffinton said that when DoHA began to build My Aged Care, the plan was to be open to connectivity with the PCEHR. The aged care sector has lobbied hard in favour of connecting the two.

“[LLLB] outlined a future direction of My Aged Care, starting off with quite a static information model,” she said. “When we started to build My Aged Care, we were building it to be open to connectivity with the eHealth record, which was then an opt-in model.

“Since the government has formally brought us back into the Department of Health in the past month, that as a priority has just got ratcheted up my priority order, how in fact My Aged Care will link with the eHealth record.”

Ms Buffinton outlined how CDC meant that the aged care system was now more of a “marketplace”, where older people and their families could choose which services to access based on their needs. She said My Aged Care was a good starting point to begin building this marketplace because of the large volumes of transactions it now carries.

“We have to make sure that we grow a critical mass to attract users and we are aware of the issue of connectivity,” she said. “We need connectivity in terms of the business systems we use to engage with providers, in terms of synchronisation between the client record and service providers, but also the synchronisation of referral data and rostering systems of our assessment organisations.

“Our website has about 150,000 visitors each month and by the end of November we are going to have more than 100,000 consumers registered for a client record. Each month we have had more than 150 visitors to the assessor and provider portals. It is probably a good base to start with.”

ITAC 2015: Health Metrics to integrate Simavita incontinence system

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.

Simavita recently signed a two-year, $469,450 agreement with the Queensland Department of Health to supply the SIM technology to the rehabilitation wards of two large public hospitals, the first of its kind in an acute care setting.

Last week, it signed an agreement with Health Metrics to integrate SIM into eCase, which is used in over 40,000 residential aged care beds in Australia and New Zealand. Once integrated, the SIM solution will be hosted as a module on the eCase system.

Clinicians using eCase will be prompted to run the instrumented SIM assessment and incontinence care planning with each assessment. Information entered into SIM will now be able to automatically form the continence care plan data on eCase.

Health Metrics CEO Steven Strange told the Information Technology in Aged Care (ITAC) conference on the Gold Coast yesterday that collaborations with companies like Simavita were part of his plan to develop the analytics and business intelligence capabilities of aged care software to begin to add real value by allowing for prediction and then prevention.

For example, he said Health Metrics was working with MIMS to use eCase to look at correlations between anti-hypertensives and renal failure that might be causing people to fall.

“We are trying to predict when they might fall and what assistance they might need before they fall,” Mr Strange said. “That’s the stuff you want to get to, that’s the high value add in technology.”

Health Metrics has developed an inference engine that can be used in its rostering system to build knowledge and better pair carers with residents.

“It can support an algorithm [so] if your company says preferred gender [of carers] is much more important than mandatory language, we will support it,” he said. “It learns as it goes.”

Health Metrics also has what it calls a universal generator that, instead of tallying incidents such as falls or pressure sores at the end of the month, can do something about it in real time.

“Say Mrs Smith fell three times in the last 48 hours,” Mr Strange said. “[eCase can] generate work activities and schedules that should support that from not happening in the next 24 hours. That’s what our universal generator does – it correlates activities from real-time data from the floor.”

Mr Strange gave a presentation at ITAC on the importance of promoting creativity within technology companies and encouraged the industry not to be afraid of failure.

He said Health Metrics had spent a lot of money trying to get its home care rostering system right but failed several times before finding a solution. There were also problems with the voice-activated, hands-free communications system that Health Metrics launched at ITAC 2014 in Hobart that allows nurses to do their documentation at the bedside.

“We launched a product around this and we were unhappy with some of the results, so it is now back into the skunkworks internally and we’re continuing to work on that,” he said.

“I really want to see an audio world for [personal care assistants] where both their hands are free, where they are doing their progress notes by audio. I want to see all PCAs not touch tablets or desktops or laptops. They are just interacting with their work schedule [by] audio.

“We are nowhere near it yet, but we also aspire to be zero training. We want to throw a carer a tablet and away they go. Bring your own device and start using the system. We are not there yet, but that’s what we aspire to.”

PCEHR annual report shows slow progress in document viewing

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.

That figure is now 2,442,824, Department of Health officials told a Senate Estimates hearing in Canberra last week.

People accessed their PCEHR via the consumer portal 322,112 times, while healthcare providers viewed records in the PCEHR system 56,640 times via their clinical information systems and 534 times through the provider portal.

A total of 75,627,565 documents were uploaded to the PCEHR system in 2014-15, which is an increase of 54 per cent from the total at June 30, 2014. However, the vast bulk of them were MBS, DVA and PBS records.

Of actual clinical records, there were 1,395,074 prescription records and 473,135 dispense record uploaded in the year.

Discharge summaries continue to rise, with 118,416 uploaded in the year, along with 10,033 event summaries and 2241 specialist letters. However, there were only 24,574 shared health summaries uploaded for a total on the system of just over 50,000 at June 30. (This has now increased to 58,695.)

The annual report provides some new information that hasn’t been included before, such as figures on what type of healthcare provider organisations are now connected. At June 30, this includes:

There are also some central and state government healthcare administration departments and an assortment of other allied health providers such as chiropractors and optometrists.

Last year saw a big new release – Release 5.0, which included the ability to upload pathology and diagnostic imaging reports to the system – although Pulse+IT understands that no pathology or DI provider has yet connected to the system.

There was also a Release 6.0 in June 2015, the annual report states, which appears to have gone unnoticed. The report says this release includes improvements of an operational nature including security, usability, accessibility and product upgrades.

The system’s target for availability is 99.5 per cent, outside of scheduled downtime. It achieved 99.7 per cent.

The system operator, DoH secretary Martin Bowles, reported that there were five audits of the system undertaken in 2014-15: three by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner on access controls applied by healthcare organisations and the privacy policies of 40 general practice clinics; and two clinical safety audits by the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care relating to shared health summaries and event summaries.

The annual report (PDF) is available on the ehealth.gov.au website.

RACGP to kick-start general practice IT strategy through eHealth forum

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.

Committee chair Nathan Pinskier said the college had in the past held RACGP computer conferences that in the 1980s and 1990s attracted hundreds of delegates. While there has been an eHealth standing committee for many years and eHealth has been high on the college’s agenda, Dr Pinskier said it was time to refocus on the future of eHealth and health IT/IM in general practice.

“I have the view and I think this is supported by the committee that we have probably spent the last four or five years chasing our tails to some extent, trying to respond to the national agenda as opposed to developing a strategy for general practice eHealth or IT/IM,” Dr Pinskier said.

“There are lots of competing and conflicting interests but probably what hasn’t happened as a consequence is a focus on the college’s requirements around workflow, standards and usability.

“I personally think this is an opportunity to take a proactive, forward-looking stance. Let’s get a whole lot of experts in a room together, let them present on where they see the current environment, or what their organisation is doing, and then focus on developing a strategy for the new RACGP expert committee.”

The college has focused on desktop software usability and workflow improvements through the Optimus project, which it ran in association with the Medical Software Industry Association (MSIA). MSIA president Emma Hossack will attend the forum, along with representatives from the federal and Victorian departments of health and human services, along with Primary Health Network (PHN) representatives and consumer groups.

RACGP president Frank Jones and eHealth luminaries such as Mukesh Haikerwal will also be in attendance.

Dr Pinskier said the forum would provide the opportunity to develop a strategy for the next three years. “I usually hate three-year plans but this is more about getting on the same page and having a shared culture in the college committee and articulating that out through to the membership.

“We’ll have a college-only afternoon session to discuss what is doable and what is aspirational and that will become a course of action going forward.”

The new REC-eHPS includes a number of well-known GPs with an interest in IT including Oliver Frank and Steven Kaye, former NEHTA clinical leads Trina Gregory, Rob Hosking and Chris Mitchell, and Hatrix/MedChart co-founder John Ainge.

It also includes consumer eHealth advocate Melissa Cadzow and Australian Association of Practice Management representative Jan Chaffey.

The forum is being held on Thursday, October 29, at the RACGP’s head office in Melbourne. Email ehealth@racgp.org.au for more information.

HiNZ 2015: Goodbye to Read as primary care begins move to SNOMED

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.

Read codes are being deprecated in the UK as it transitions to SNOMED as the single clinical terminology. The NHS plans to have all primary care systems using SNOMED by the end of next year and the entire health system using it by April 2020.

New Zealand is also following the lead, with St John ambulance service adopting SNOMED for its new electronic patient record system and the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) working on swapping from Read to SNOMED for personal injury claims.

National Health IT Board eHealth clinical lead Sadhana Maraj told the Health Informatics New Zealand (HiNZ) conference in Christchurch last week that SNOMED already underpins the NZ Formulary and the NZ Universal List of Medicines, among other national systems.

Dr Maraj said the adoption of SNOMED as the single nationwide clinical terminology system will mean primary care software vendors will need to show compliance with SNOMED.

Nelson GP Bev Nicolls told the conference that in view of the government’s announcement last week that it would introduce a single national electronic health record, New Zealand needed to get a single terminology sorted.

“We need a clinical terminology system that is universal and mandated, so any term that I use for blood pressure or a diagnosis is exactly the same as any clinical colleague in the country,” Dr Nicolls said.

“[Read] is a clinical coding system but it is being phased out by the NHS, who have kindly passed their stuff on to us. Read is going to go anyway … It’s not an if, it’s a when. At some point we are going to do it, and we just have to get on with it.”

Dr Nicolls said SNOMED was necessary to underpin a national EHR, in particular for things like medicines, allergies and clinical decision support tools. “The days of texting in the allergy terminology should be gone,” he said.

“If I am typing in a SNOMED diagnosis, I want a pop-up with something that tells me how to manage it automatically. In the UK, that is very well embedded. If I’m typing in a diagnosis, typing in a word that I want to be a diagnosis, it will pop up with a Read code on the side. I click it and it will then offer me decision support.

“If you want one decision support tool for the country, you need one coding system to trigger it.”

The secondary care sector in New Zealand uses the Australian modification of the ICD-10 clinical coding system, which is also being mapped to SNOMED.

Dr Nicolls said SNOMED was now starting to be used in the secondary sector, particularly in emergency where his colleague Tom Morton, director of ED at Nelson Hospital, has developed a SNOMED reference set that is also being used with his award-winning Emergency Department at a Glance tool.

SNOMED is also being used as part of the National Patient Flow project, which is aimed at measuring the patient journey through secondary care services.

New Zealand will host the International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation’s (IHTSDO) annual conference on SNOMED in Wellington in October next year.

HiNZ 2015: Doctors take out Clinicians’ Challenge top prizes

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.

James McKelvie, a senior registrar with Waikato District Health Board, won the new ideas category for his electronic referral, risk assessment and real-time audit of cataract surgery initiative. Runner-up in the category was Rob Ticehurst, principal pharmacist at Auckland DHB, who proposed a joined-up system to manage patient risks associated with medication allergies.

Hong Sheng Chiong, an ophthalmology registrar at Gisborne Hospital, won the active project/development category for his oDocs Eye Care initiative, which uses mobile technology to increase access to ophthalmic care.

Runner-up was Kaitaia GP Lance O’Sullivan, who presented vMOKO, an initiative that uses mobile technology to remotely diagnose and treat skin conditions in schoolchildren.

The awards were presented at the Health Informatics New Zealand (HiNZ) conference in Christchurch last week.

Health Minister Jonathan Coleman said in a statement that the initiatives showed innovation was alive and well in the health IT sector.

“It’s great to see clinicians finding better use of information and technology to deliver more timely quality patient care which can enable clinicians to spend more time with patients and less on administration,” Dr Coleman said.

“We want to see more health care delivered in the community and people living healthier lives away from hospitals. Using technology has a key role to play in this.”

Australasian health IT week in review: September 26

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

Patients are people, not ‘consumers’, says Child
NZ Doctor ~ Cliff Taylor ~ 25/09/2015

NZMA chair Stephen Child has strongly criticised a draft discussion paper from the Health Quality & Safety Commission, describing it as difficult to understand and marred with inappropriate terminology.


Fixing Qld Health’s IT systems: start with the plumbing
iTNews ~ Allie Coyne ~ 24/09/2015

Queensland Health will eschew a big bang transformation of its legacy systems in favour of a lower-risk, incremental approach to systems replacement in the hopes of reviving its IT fortunes.


Telehealth helps chronic illness sufferers manage
Toowoomba Chronicle ~ Cheryl Flett ~ 24/09/2015

Made available through local community aged care provider integratedliving Australia, following a highly successful pilot program, the support system remotely monitors a person’s vital health signs on a daily basis through an easy to use tablet device,


Fiona Stanley Hospital: dirty theatres, IT woes blamed on Serco
WA Today ~ AAP ~ 23/09/2015

A parliamentary inquiry has heard of ongoing woes at Perth’s new Fiona Stanley Hospital including unsanitary operating theatres and staff “drowning in paperwork”.


Call for new communications minister to help improve sector ICT capability
Australian Ageing Agenda ~ Natasha Egan ~ 23/09/2015

Mitch Fifield may have moved on from aged care but he has not escaped the sector completely as one peak vows to meet with the minister in his new role to lobby for ICT support on a platform of productivity.


SMS reminders to stay healthy could save lives for heart attack patients, researchers say
ABC News ~ Will Ockenden ~ 23/09/2015

A simple text message might be all it takes after a major hospital visit to keep a patient healthy and on track.


NBN rollout still ‘technology agnostic’, says Fifield
Computerworld ~ Rohan Pearce ~ 23/09/2015

Australia’s new communications minister, Senator Mitch Fifield, has repeated prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s claim that the roll out of the National Broadband Network is “technology agnostic” under the Coalition government.


Telehealth scheme lets GPs set own fees
Australian Doctor ~ Tessa Hoffman ~ 23/09/2015

A new player spruiking pay-by-the-minute GP phone consults has entered the telehealth market.


Australian doctor duo walk away from well-paying careers to pursue start-up life
The Age ~ Matthew Hall ~ 22/09/2015

It was a tough conversation for Melbourne medical students Andrew Lin and Hon Weng Chong telling their parents that, after studying for six years, they were going to walk away from careers as doctors to become tech entrepreneurs.


Concussion management software gets RWC run
New Zealand Herald ~ Staff writer ~ 22/09/2015

Concussion management software developed by Kiwi technology company CSx has been put to the test by teams in Rugby World Cup 2015 as a UK medical chief calls for rule changes to protect players from head injuries.


Fifield to serve as Turnbull’s faithful foot soldier
The Australian ~ Supratim Adhikari ~ 21/09/2015

The communications portfolio has in recent time been the domain of two larger-than-life figures of the political arena.


Govt moots clampdown on e-health PIP
Australian Doctor ~ Tessa Hoffman ~ 21/09/2015

GPs may have to upload a mandatory number of files to their patients’ personally controlled electronic health records before they can claim incentive payments as part the Federal Government’s latest attempt to boost the system.


How much do FTTP NBN connections really cost?
The Australian ~ Mark Gregory ~ 18/09/2015

New Zealand’s equivalent to NBN Co provides damaging evidence that the Coalition’s National Broadband Network (NBN) is unlikely to be delivered more affordably and sooner than Labor’s full-fibre plan.


International health IT week in review: July 26

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

With #FIXEHR, AMA fine-tunes its Meaningful Use reboot strategy
FierceEMR ~ Marla Durben Hirsch ~ 23/07/2015

The American Medical Association (AMA) has kicked its fight against poorly operating electronic health records and the Meaningful Use program up a notch, in a rather novel way.


E-Referrals back up to 40,000 a day
Digital Health News ~ Rebecca McBeth ~ 23/07/2015

The number of referrals being made on the new NHS e-Referral Service has risen to 40,000 a day, the same as were made using the Choose and Book system.


Report: Canada’s health IT ‘lags on many fronts’
FierceEMR ~ Marla Durben Hirsch ~ 22/07/2015

Canada has many of the same problems with electronic health record adoption and data sharing as the United States, according to a Canadian report published this month of the Advisory Panel in Healthcare Innovation.


GP system suppliers data request dropped
Digital Health News ~ Rebecca McBeth ~ 22/07/2015

NHS England has dropped plans to request GP patient appointment data directly from clinical system suppliers.


E-health feedback loop helps diabetics boost outcomes
FierceHealthIT ~ Dan Bowman ~ 22/07/2015

The use of telehealth remote monitoring as part of a eHealth larger feedback loop for diabetics led to vastly improved A1c levels compared with patients who did not use the technology, according to research published this week in the Journal of Medical Internet Research.


Panel recommends folding Infoway into new agency
Canadian Healthcare Technology ~ CanHealth ~ 22/07/2015

Three federal agencies, including Canada Health Infoway, should be merged into a new organization, called the Healthcare Innovation Agency of Canada, to spur the modernization of healthcare across the country.


Researchers call for support for data in the cloud to facilitate genomics research
EhealthNews.eu ~ eHealthnews.eu ~ 22/07/2015

In the journal Nature prominent researchers from Canada, Europe and the U.S. have made a powerful call to major funding agencies, asking them to commit to establishing a global genomic data commons in the cloud that could be easily accessed by authorized researchers worldwide.


Patient access to coded GP info by April
Digital Health News ~ Rebecca McBeth ~ 21/07/2015

GP practices must offer patients online access to detailed coded information from their medical record by April next year.


Docs air EHR frustrations at AMA town hall
FierceEMR ~ Marla Durben Hirsch ~ 21/07/2015

Physicians are facing numerous challenges with electronic health records and the Meaningful Use program, and are being given a better chance to share them publicly due to a new initiative spearheaded by the American Medical Association, launched at a town hall meeting July 20.


DoD standardizing IT infrastructure ahead of EHR modernization
HealthcareITNews ~ Jack McCarthy ~ 21/07/2015

As the Defense Health Agency gets set to start the massive undertaking of replacing and modernizing its electronic health record system, the agency is standardizing and consolidating its sprawling IT infrastructure.


Manchester live with integrated record
Digital Health News ~ Thomas Meek ~ 20/07/2015

Several Manchester health and social care providers are live with an integrated care record for ‘at risk’ patients using Graphnet’s CareCentric.


Athenahealth launches free texting
HealthcareITNews ~ Bernie Monegain ~ 20/07/2015

Athenahealth today unveiled athenaText, a secure text messaging service integrated with athenahealth’s cloud-based EHR platform.


NME exit plans less risky with year left
Digital Health News ~ Thomas Meek ~ 20/07/2015

The number of clinical IT deployments at risk of missing the July 2016 deadline for being moved from national to local contracts in the North, Midlands and East has halved over the past month.


ONC unveils patient safety roadmap
HealthcareITNews ~ Mike Miliard ~ 20/07/2015

As part of its ongoing battle against medical errors and adverse events, the Office of the National Coordinator has released its Health IT Safety Center Roadmap, putting forth a plan for making IT a better protector of, rather than a risk to, patient safety.


Can smartphones automate the patient registration process?
Health Data Management ~ Joseph Goedert ~ 20/07/2015

An initiative to standardize, automate and mobilize the patient registration process to improve the patient experience and ensure critical information gets to providers is underway with the goal of conducting and assessing an initial pilot program this year.


UCLA Health hack compromises info for 4.5 million individuals
FierceHealthIT ~ Dan Bowman ~ 17/07/2015

A hack of UCLA Health’s computer network may have compromised personal and medical information for as many as 4.5 million individuals, the health system said Friday.


New app turns HealthKit into a communications tool
mHealth News ~ Eric Wicklund ~ 17/07/2015

An Israeli company is tapping into the Apple HealthKit platform to create an emergency app for people with chronic conditions.


RCH moves to browser-based consults with WebRTC platform

Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital (RCH) has moved to a WebRTC platform based on Healthdirect Australia’s video call service for providing telehealth consultations with patients and remote clinicians.

RCH has been providing telehealth services to patients for almost four years, initially using the GoToMeeting video conferencing platform, and has seen growth of upwards of 60 per cent per year in the number of consultations it provides.

More than 20 of the hospital’s departments use telehealth, 15 of them regularly, as part of a commitment to making telehealth business as usual at the hospital.

The new platform will allow any patient using the Chrome browser on a desktop or Android tablet equipped with a webcam to simply click a button on the RCH telehealth website to start a video call.

No extra software needs to be downloaded by the patient except for a plug-in that allows each participant to screenshare as the video conferencing is conducted between browsers.

While the RCH’s service is only available for Chrome and Android users at the moment, the development of WebRTC is supported by all of the big names in both browser technology and hardware, including Microsoft, Google, Apple and Mozilla. RCH’s telehealth program manager Susan Jury said Healthdirect was currently working on enabling its platform for iPads.

Paediatric neurologist and RCH telehealth clinical lead Andrew Kornberg said that in addition to being very easy to use and with processes designed specifically for healthcare, the technology has the scope to allow the hospital to develop new uses for the service, including doing screening clinics with remote paediatricians.

“A few of our country paediatricians are very keen on establishing screening clinics,” Professor Kornberg said.

This would involve the specialist at the hospital consulting with a number of paediatricians and patients and allow them to decide whether the patient needs to be seen in person, allow some diagnoses to be managed in the community or to have some investigations completed before the child is seen at the hospital. “It essentially becomes a much more efficient process along the way,” he said.

Healthdirect Australia has been investigating the use of WebRTC as a video conferencing extension to its various telephone-based hotlines for the past couple of years and was planning to use it as part of the after hours GP hotline.

That was put on hold as the government’s review into after hours care proceeded, but it is now live for parents using the Pregnancy, Birth and Baby hotline, who can now make a video call to a maternity health nurse as well as a phone call.

Healthdirect Australia CIO Anton Donker said while WebRTC was simple and easy to use technology, the actual basis of the video call platform was its management layer, not the technology itself.

“WebRTC is just a back-end video technology and we use it because this is really where the world is going in terms of standards,” Professor Donker said. “Google and Apple and Microsoft are all moving to WebRTC, but fundamentally, the management platform could use Vidyo or Skype for Business or any other of the video technologies and it wouldn’t matter.”

Professor Donker said the platform needed to work with how consumers enter the health system and how organisations handle things like appointments, waiting lists and waiting rooms.

“That is the importance of the management layer,” he said. “It just happens to be that WebRTC is the most usable and accessible video technology because you don’t need anything other than your browser.”

Healthdirect is not offering the platform on a commercial basis but has been given permission by its shareholders – the Commonwealth and most of the states and territories – to work with a range of organisations on making it suitable for a variety of healthcare settings.

“We are adjusting the software to work with the main service patterns that we see in healthcare,” he said.

While Healthdirect assisted with software and design, much of the work has been done by the Royal Children’s, as it needed to configure the system for its own purposes. This will be the same for any organisation using the platform, Professor Donker said.

“For example, they have to work out whether they want to do all of their clinics coming into a single point or if they want different web entry points associated with different services and clinics, and it’s got to be able to do that really simply and easily.

“Our job is to ensure that the software can work with the different patterns that people use for how they currently deliver care. They want to be able to add it easily to their existing appointment and management systems and billing systems. It doesn’t replace all of that stuff, it just sits alongside it.”

The Royal Children’s service has always aimed to manage its telehealth appointments and scheduling in the same way face-to-face appointments, making telehealth business as usual at the hospital, Ms Jury said.

Telehealth at RCH integrates with Q-Flow, the hospital’s outpatients booking system, and letters, Medicare consent and billings are handled much the same. “It’s not like it’s all solved, but it’s becoming increasingly easier.”

Ms Jury said at least 200 people had been trained in providing telehealth at RCH since the transition to the Healthdirect platform, but she said the system was so intuitive “that people just know how to use it”.

“It’s really great for doctors because their brains are full of medicine and they don’t want to be worried about technology. And it’s great for patients as well because it is so easy.”

Prof Kornberg agreed. “It isn’t about the technology but about finding telehealth a place in the care of patients. The technology doesn’t really matter as you can use two cans as long as there is video between them, but I think the positives of this platform are that it is built for health, it is secure and we can partner with Healthdirect and talk to them about what we need. They are very conducive to helping with that because they want to learn just as much as we do.”