Pulse+IT Blog

New week, same shemozzle

Written by Kate McDonald on 20 July 2018.

One day in the not-too-distant future, communications and business students in universities across the land will sign up for a course called Marketing Disasters 101 and be presented with a case study about the utter train wreck that was the great My Health Record opt-out launch of July 2018.

Pretty much the only thing that could have made this week's debacle worse would have been an actual breach of the system itself. On Monday morning, a huge gang of online activists were just waiting for the clock to tick over to opt out before they let all hell break loose, and my word did they succeed. Social and mass media were dominated in the morning by stories about long delays and system collapses, and by the afternoon it had turned into a veritable production line of tinfoil hats.

One absolute hero got on the phone at 7am to opt out and then for the next few hours martyred himself to the cause by giving 10-minute updates on Twitter about how long he had to wait on the hotline. In the afternoon, he took to claiming that the use of the reCaptcha plug-in on the opt-out website meant everyone's identity verification information was now being flogged off to Google.

Long game succeeds for the anti-faxers

Written by Kate McDonald on 13 July 2018.

There was good news for healthcare's anti-fax advocates this week with the announcement that the Department of Health would finally move to allow GPs to send referrals to the My Aged Care system through their clinical software.

It never made much sense to have phone, fax and webform referrals but not a more suitable route, considering the cost of equipping the My Aged Care contact centre to receive secure messages from any of the four or five vendors on the market wouldn't have been high.

Much betwixt a SIP and a PIP

Written by Kate McDonald on 06 July 2018.

This week got off to a rather officious start when the Australian Digital Health Agency rolled out Health Minister Greg Hunt to belatedly do the honours in officially launching the national digital health strategy and its accompanying framework for action.

The strategy was in fact released last August although it is apparently just now going to kick off, while the draft framework for action was actually released in March and nothing much seems to have changed since then.

Don't go chasing ambulances

Written by Kate McDonald on 29 June 2018.

HealthEngine found itself in a pretty pickle this week when in another bout of bad PR for the online appointments booking service, it was revealed by the ABC to have been flogging off patient contact details to personal injury compensation firm Slater and Gordon.

Exactly what the reasoning was behind developing “referral partnership pilots” with law firms or private health insurers we don't know, but by week's end, HealthEngine CEO Marcus Tan was apologising and promising to review the company's business model for advertising and referrals.

TripAdvisor for doctors trips up

Written by Pulse+IT on 15 June 2018.

The Queen's birthday long weekend languor seemed to grip the Australian health IT industry this week and it turned out to be a bit of a slow one, but the weekend itself was spiced up somewhat by a rather fascinating article in Fairfax newspapers on Saturday that had a lot of us agog.

That was the bad review saga, in which it was revealed that online appointments booking service HealthEngine had been editing customer reviews of practices on its site to such a degree that negatives were not just deleted, but sanitised to the point they became positives.

Where will Telstra Health be in 2022?

Written by Kate McDonald on 22 June 2018.

This week in health IT got off to a gallop when we revealed there'd been finally been a breakthrough in secure messaging interoperability after many years of reporting on false starts, but by mid-week, all eyes were on the plummeting returns for Telstra's long-suffering shareholders.

We realised that Pulse+IT is getting a bit long in the tooth when we reflected that we've been reporting on attempts to make secure messaging interoperable since the magazine was established back in 2006. Since then, there have been any number of announcements of breakthroughs: the secure message delivery (SMD) standard, the announcement of the SMX collaboration involving the three main vendors, NEHTA's SMD-POD trials, which promised lots and went nowhere.

Apple on FHIR with third-party apps

Written by Kate McDonald on 08 June 2018.

One of the biggest stories this week for the technology community was Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Jose, where in addition to previewing its new macOS and iOS, Apple announced that it was opening up its Health Records APIs to third-party developers.

Apple first launched this app back in January, revealing it has been working with EMR vendors on the Argonaut Project to use the FHIR standard to develop APIs that can allow different systems to talk to each other. This involved a restricted list of vendors and 12 healthcare organisations, which has now increased to over 50, all in the US.

Sign up for Pulse+IT website access

For more information, click here.