The big budget largesse laid out on Tuesday night for aged care technology and the Strengthening Medicare program was somewhat overshadowed, as was the rest of the news this week, by the cyber attack on MediSecure that was reported yesterday.

It’s still unclear exactly what the nature of the incident was and whether it was a ransomware attack as has been suggested, but if it was, the hackers chose a pretty poor target. A good little company in the past, MediSecure is barely a going concern these days following its loss to rival eRx in the bid to become the sole delivery service for PBS electronic prescriptions in Australia.

MediSecure did vow to stay in business but it what remains of it is, as far as we can see, not too much. It still obviously held some personally identifiable data as it reported the attack as required to regulators such as the OAIC and ADHA, and the Australian Cyber Security Centre and the Australian Federal Police are on the case.

The good news is that the vast majority of any data held by MedSecure in its prescription exchange was transferred over to eRx last year, and MediSecure is no longer switched on for PBS prescriptions in prescribing software. We are unaware of any other businesses that it’s actually involved in.

(Meanwhile, every two-bit IT security firm in the country and around the world has got their PR people to fire off to the media some boilerplate “commentary” from their “experts” on how healthcare organisations can improve their security “posture”. Ambulance chasers the lot of them.)

Elsewhere in the news this week, Tuesday night’s budget had a few surprises, not the least of which was the unexpectedly large sum of money allocated to aged care. Most of the $1.4 billion is going to what is described as “significant technology and platform maintenance and enhancements” as well as a bit to get the new Support at Home (SaH) program off the ground by July next year.

$1.4 billion is certainly a headline number but there was precious little detail in the budget papers on exactly what it would be used for– which is unusual, as everyone likes to boast to about these things – and there was little discussion of it at a Department of Health and Aged Care special budget webinar featuring all five health and aged care ministers on Wednesday. In fact the ministers and the webinar host, DoHAC secretary Blair Comley, seemed to studiously avoid answering questions on it.

It seems likely that the money is to be spent on internal DoHAC and Services Australia payment and operational systems and not, as many aged care providers have been demanding, to invest in technology at the coalface.

Hidden away in the budget was a nice chunk for Healthdirect Australia for its virtual services, an extra $57.4 million for the Australian Digital Health Agency to continue its initiatives under the health delivery modernisation program and to update My Health Record – my word, they are churning through cash on that – and a little bit of money for system changes to MyMedicare which the RACGP was none too pleased about, but then again, they never are.

There was also $1.9 million marked for the CSIRO in one of the budget tables but no explanation for what it was for. Turns out it was to extend the terrific Sparked FHIR accelerator program for another year. This was confirmed at the Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia pathology informatics conference in Sydney this week, and by DoHAC assistant secretary Simon Cleverley on LinkedIn.

Speaking of pathology, also in the news this week was the sharing by default mandate and the removal of the seven-day delay, discussed during a very interesting Australian Association of Practice Management webinar this week. It seems that the legislation mandating sharing by default will not quite make it through Parliament this year and early next year is the most likely.

The seven-day delay may be dropped sooner, again angering the RACGP and the other medical colleges. But again, this is nothing new. We were reading up on our reporting from 10 years ago when the seven-day delay was first decided upon and the same arguments were made back then as they are today, despite plenty of evidence that anxiety over the release of test results is way over-egged.

Sharing pathology reports by default and the seven-day delay were both topics at the aforementioned RCPA seminar, but a much bigger topic was that there is still a huge amount of work to be done under the bonnet before they are a reality, not the least because of the ongoing difficulty with standardisation. Despite the fact that the college’s Standardised Pathology Informatics in Australia (SPIA) guidelines were approved by its board back in 2017 – after many years of work through the PUTS and PITUS projects on terminologies and units of measure – it is still a struggle for any lab to use them in a uniform way.

The RCPA has been running two pilot pathology informatics projects with public provider SA Pathology and private provider Sullivan Nicolaides Pathology, and it’s clear there is a long ways to go. Meanwhile, the private providers will still come under the pump to upload more path reports to the My Health Record, despite the majority of requests still coming in on paper. Until eRequesting is widespread – and there was $5m in the budget to boost this work under the Sparked accelerator – then whatever desire the federal government has for more path results on My Health Record, it is not going to happen quickly. More on that next week.

There were also some pretty great stories from vendors, including Best Practice’s new FHIR-powered mobile app, which received a huge amount of attention, as did Medtech Global’s new radiology results system. GP software vendors continue to innovate.

Those two stories were some of our most popular of the week, even more so than the budget, but all were overtaken by the MediSecure breach. We’ll have more on that next week too.

That brings us to the poll question for this week:

Were you satisfied with the federal budget’s health and aged care IT priorities?

Vote here, and leave your comments below.

Last week, we asked: Do you agree with the Productivity Commission’s estimate of savings through digital technology? We got a dismally low response to this poll so make of the results what you will: two-thirds (67% v 33%) disagreed with the estimate.