It was another yuge week in health IT and digital health around the world, including here in Australia, where some major projects moved along at pace.
This included the release of a tender for a FHIR server solution by the Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA), which will see new infrastructure built using the FHIR standard, which will be used alongside the existing My Health Record infrastructure for time being, and will allow for a much more structured, data-rich ecosystem.
The tender comes in two parts, the first of which is the My Health Record on FHIR project, or MoF, and the second involves work on rearchitecting the national repositories and integrating the National Clinical Terminology Service.
According to an industry briefing today, the project is set to get moving at pace. The tender was released last week, and a preferred vendor will be chosen next January, with a technical go-live set for July 2025.
We must say that we are enjoying ADHA’s use of acronyms for our particular delectation. In the past, they referred to the national infrastructure modernisation program or the NIMP, and now we have the MoF. We very much appreciate the opportunities for puns that this project offers.
In addition to modernising the My Health Record and national repositories, this project is going to be part of the build of the national Health Information Exchange, which was announced earlier this year.
Reflecting on that, we had a brilliant opinion piece written by Robin Mann, Bhavesh Patel, Tal Rapke and Honor Magon on what they think the HIE could potentially do for Australia and for the world.
There is a lot of food for thought in the piece, with the writers arguing that a national HIE can do some pretty good things, including reducing demand on healthcare, driving more efficiency in healthcare, and providing a big boost to the economy.
As evil media types, we immediately zeroed in on the most controversial recommendation in the article, which was to free up data in the HIE for research and commercial use for entrepreneurs and start-ups to trial new applications. We’ve asked about this in our poll question this week.
This is a very fraught area, particularly as after 12 years of the My Health Record we still can’t work out how to legislate for secondary use of its data, but what the HIE means, particularly in the new era of AI, is something much bigger so we might as well start the discussion now.
Also this week, Western Australia called for registrations of interest for its statewide EMR. WA is the last of the Australian states or territories to go to market for a statewide system – Tasmania is still, after about two years, trying to decide what system it wants to use – but in the meantime, WA is rolling out its digital medical record into all hospitals, and finally making moves for an EMR.
We also heard about the New Dunedin Hospital, which has been floated in the past as one of the most digitally advanced hospital in the southern hemisphere, but that is looking very shaky now. Unfortunately, New Zealand says it has run out of money and the NDH may need to take a haircut, including to bed numbers. Who knows what will happen to the big plans for digital there.
There is a corollary over in Ireland, where its New Children’s Hospital is setting records for having broken so many budgets that they don’t even bother anymore. It is now estimated to cost €2.24 billion. It has big plans for digital including an Epic EMR, InterSystems’ HealthShare integration engine and a unified patient infotainment system from OneView.
Budgets there are supposed to be constrained too but it could be helped out by the handy €14 billion in back taxes that Apple is about to pay.
Still in New Zealand, and its national telehealth service Whakarongorau will be an anchor tenant in Microsoft’s new hyperscale cloud region set to open later this year. Whakarongorau’s strategy is big and will include integrating advanced AI tools to enhance service delivery and operational efficiency.
AI is never out of the headlines these days, and we had a really good chat about it on a global scale in the PULSE podcast which went live today. We had a bit of a chat about a story in Crikey this week concerning Harrison.AI and I-MED Radiology and whether or not patient data has been used to train AI models there. We also spoke to ePatient Dave about his new patient AI movement, which sounds brilliant.
At the same time, it was reported that OpenAI had just completed a deal valuing the company at $157 billion. Mind blowing. But then again, so is the future of AI.
That brings us to our poll question for the week:
Should anonymised data in the HIE be accessed by commercial ventures in future?
Vote here and leave your comments below.
Last week, we asked: Do you think reducing admin workload will encourage GPs to stay in practice?
Yes, said three quarters of respondents (72 per cent). Here’s what you said.
Yes! BUT it’s critical that we implement a universal consent model for consumers. Some people will be happy to have their data used for research, population health, commercial purposes etc. Others will not. Give everyone informed consent options. If we are serious about putting consumers in the drivers seat, it’s not that hard.
No – Commercial ventures can’t be trusted.
No – but should be off limits until after patients death
No – Not for ever but the general Australian public need to becomes more data aware and know the value of their health data to be able to provide informed consent to this
No – Only with patient consent. We need to get everyone confident in uploading and looking at their info in MHR before we start sharing it to anyone who wants it.
no – possibly, depending on anonymisation, and a fee or royalties to the public system
No – off limits for ever
No – A way of developing simulated data to allow similar types of invesitgations.
Yes – Anonymous data is totally fine to share as long as the process is robust
No – Data should be available for research but never for profit/commercial purposes
Not only no but hell no. It’s bad enough that people have a MHR they don’t even know about, which has all the privacy controls set to the lowest possible setting, but even people who are aware they have one but are without good computer and English literacy are unable to set their security levels to what they desire. If the PTB can’t even educate people to the fact that they have a MHR how long will it take them to make all the controls accessible to everyone AND educate them on what secondary use of data even is!