It was no surprise that the most popular story this week on Pulse+IT was our report on a workshop on secure messaging held at the HIC conference in Brisbane, where it was revealed that the National Authentication Service for Health (NASH) needed a major overhaul if it was ever going to be of any use to anyone.
Developing a useable authentication system has been a bottomless pit from which little has emerged in the decade or so that we've been covering it. As we wrote back in 2010, NASH has been an integral part of the eHealth agenda since NEHTA's inception in 2005, but where once outsourcing sounded good it quickly turned terminal, and even though the Department of Human Services came to the rescue in the PCEHR days, NASH has caused trouble ever since.
Pulse+IT spent a couple of days at the annual HIC conference this week, basking in the glorious sunshine that BrisVegas likes to shower on its lucky inhabitants even in winter. It was nice to see all of the big EMR vendors there and they were all very nice to us, even those whose reputations we were busy tarnishing with some of our reporting in the last few weeks.
Cerner was in the news through a combination of our stories on the disquiet in Queensland over the planned new anaesthesia module and there was also a nice anecdote that ADHA CEO Tim Kelsey told at HIC about how he unexpectedly ended up in hospital in Sydney recently and was able to observe first-hand the frustration and rage felt by some clinicians when dealing with electronic systems.
It didn't come as much of a surprise to learn late on Friday that the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) Health Council had given the go-ahead to the new national digital health strategy. After all, it was revealed just recently that the state and territory health departments were all pretty keen on it and had recommended that everyone at COAG say aye as well.
What has come as a surprise is that the strategy is actually pretty good. We were dreading the usual high falutin' but meaningless verbiage that usually infests these documents but while the strategy is a bit too long, it is at the same time succinct, and more importantly it is written in plain English so even nincompoops like us can understand it.
Pulse+IT was indulging in a session of Olympic-class eye rolling on Friday after we received a bunch of tweets telling us that Greg Hunt was boasting his government was going to solve the long-term problem of accidental prescription drug overdoses by funding the roll-out of a national real-time prescription monitoring scheme to the tune of $16 million.
We've covered this topic at length for many years now and were there the last time this scheme was announced, which was back in 2012 and by a different health minister in a different government and costing $8m at the time. (This of course followed $5m being allocated two years before that, in the Fifth Community Pharmacy Agreement.) It's the same old story though: here's a problem we know about, here's one way we can help solve it, let's do very little for five years and then – ta-da! – here's $16 million and a nice press release. All sorted.
One of the most popular stories this week on Pulse+IT was our article on Queensland's move to allow GPs to take a look at their patient's hospital medical record through a new portal that links to Queensland Health's The Viewer, the web-based application that lets QH clinicians see patient data from different clinical systems and different hospitals throughout the state.
The Queensland government had to write new legislation last year to get the system up and running, and from what we hear, it is going to be a very popular move. There are strict privacy and registration procedures that GPs have to go through, including lots of hoops to prove their identity before they are allowed to register, but in the wake of last week's revelation that it may be the HPOS system at fault for the Medicare number leak, that's probably not a bad thing.
In what is an unusually quiet period for the normally super-active eHealth sector, our top story this week turned out to be the fortnight-old news that the draft of the long-promised national digital health strategy would be on the agenda of the COAG Health Council when it meets next month.
We first heard about this on July 4, although to be honest it's not a secret. Having been delayed repeatedly since 2013 and rewritten a couple of times, the strategy was next scheduled for November 2016 but was delayed yet again until the newly appointed Australian Digital Health Agency CEO could put his mark on it.
The slightly delayed Digital Hospitals Handbook and news that Telstra Health had been granted access to the My Health Record system for its HealthNow app may have been the most popular stories on Pulse+IT this week, but out in the wider health and IT communities one story dominated, and that was the Guardian newspaper's discovery that Medicare numbers were for sale in the darker recesses of the internet.
Guardian journalist Paul Farrell was able to buy his own number for the price of a few bitcoins from a cheery-sounding vendor on the dark web, and his resulting story made waves around the country on Tuesday. It doesn't appear that everyone's numbers have been released but Mr Farrell's investigations show that the vendor had made a few tidy sales, numbering about 75 all up.
