The FHIR standard was back in the spotlight this week with the ongoing fall-out from the recent publication of a super duper report into vulnerabilities that may eventuate from poor implementations of the standard by third parties.

Last week, HL7 International took what is a very unusual step in releasing a statement emphasising that the vulnerabilities are at the implementation end and certainly not at the standard itself, and touting that the author had changed the title of her report to reflect this.

In the real world, Australia and New Zealand began to put into action their respective roadmaps out of lockdown this week as vaccination numbers rose to much hoped-for levels. However, in the somewhat obscure world of health IT standards, a quite remarkable report was released late last week that has stimulated a firestorm of debate over the basic security of healthcare data.

Las Vegas-based cybersecurity analyst, former hacker and content creator Alissa Knight – who going by her bio and her Knight Ink business description is surely to become the subject of a novel one day if not a pretty cool movie – released the second phase of a year-long research project she has undertaken into the basic security of apps and aggregators drawing data from FHIR APIs linked to electronic medical records and other patient record databases.

Pulse+IT was a keen attendee at this week’s Health Information Management Association of Australia’s (HIMAA) annual conference, which naturally in this pandemic era was held virtually. It was pretty good too, and revealed quite a lot of information about Victoria’s digital health roadmap, which was launched back in August but got little if any coverage due to the pandemic itself.

The roadmap is in no way a grand, sweeping vision like others purport to be but is instead built around existing projects – most of which have been precipitated by Stephen Duckett’s Targeting Zero review of hospital safety and quality assurance from 2016 and the more recent Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System – and turns out to be a pragmatic, practical strategy that takes into account the decentralised nature of the state’s health service.

A landmark report in Australian healthcare was handed down this week with the release of the recommendations from the independent Primary Health Reform Steering Group on the federal government’s primary healthcare plan for the next 10 years.

The report is very much influenced by the Department of Health’s voluntary patient registration (VPR) model, which seems to have taken over as preferred policy from ideas like Health Care Homes and patient-centred medical homes. (It’s interesting that GPs who have in the past railed against the idea of capitation seem to be quite keen on VPR, but that’s a discussion for another day.)