ANZ News

Swinburne University’s National eTherapy Centre has partnered with medtech startup Coviu to allow Australians to access quality mental health services through encrypted, real-time text chat sessions. The service is offered as part of Swinburne’s Mental Health Online, which is free for all Australians and provides access to treatment programs for common mental health issues including depression and anxiety. Real-time text chat sessions with clinicians will now be a part of the service, alongside email and video calls, offering an additional modality to suit a broader remit of needs within the community.   THE LARGER TREND In April this year, Swinburne partnered with Coviu for telehealth education. The partnership sees Swinburne embedding Coviu’s technology into the curriculum of nursing, occupational therapy, psychology, dietetics, health science, and digital health and informatics. The technology has also been implemented into Swinburne’s new Master of Physiotherapy and Graduate Certificate in Teleaudiology. ON THE RECORD “Since being rolled out in March this year, the chat sessions have become a very popular option amongst our clients. It’s now one of the most common modalities we use to support clients in completing their online mental health program. For many clients, a real-time text chat session is a practical first step into talking with a health practitioner, which for some can be quite confronting,” said Dr Liz Seabrook, Digital Mental Health Fellow at Swinburne, in a statement. CEO and co-founder of Coviu Dr Silvia Pfeiffer said: “Our goal is to make healthcare services easily accessible and usable to all citizens, and this partnership with Swinburne’s Mental Health Online service takes us another step closer. We work hard to ensure our telehealth technology is easy to use, and are constantly looking at new ways for people to use the service. I’m thrilled to hear the text-only chat sessions are helping hundreds of people across Australia.”

The program, which will be a key part of Monash university's new National Centre for Healthy Ageing, will use EHRs to help monitor the frequency of dementia and associated risk factors.

Garvan Institute of Medical Research scientists hope the method, called RAGE-seq, could have powerful applications for precision medicine.

The company says its Cito platform offers real-time single views of patient information, unifying and structuring clinical data into customisable virtual electronic health records.

An Australian Institute of Health and Welfare study finds that 92% of patients said they received the information they needed about their care or treatment from their general practitioner.

The Western Australia initiative will leverage existing programs and locally based expertise, as well as deliver programs currently operating outside the state.

The Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) is partnering with Australian software organisations to design world leading software for specialists. ADHA has provided nine specialist software vendors with A$40,000 each to complete designs that seamlessly and securely integrate the My Health Record (MHR) into their current systems to bring benefits to specialists, such as cardiologists or anaesthetists.  In addition to funding, ADHA will provide design expertise to work with each vendor’s design teams to co-produce improvements in design with their users.  The nine specialist software vendors are:  Best Practice Software Clinic to Cloud Clinical Computers Genie Solutions Intrahealth Medical-Objects Medical Wizard Software for Specialists Zedmed The software organisations will work with ADHA and specialists to develop these designs over the coming months. ADHA ran an expression of interest process in May 2019, where software developers with a clinical information system being used in at least 10 private specialist practices in Australia at 1 May 2019 were invited to apply. MHR DEVELOPMENTS Some parts of the health sector have enthusiastically embraced the MHR – such as community pharmacy which has increased registrations from 20% in June 2018 to 86% in June 2019. ADHA is now turning its focus to increasing use by specialists over the next 12 months. The agency announced that in February 2019 that 9 out of 10 Australians have a MHR following the conclusion of the opt-out period. Last month, the pathology departments of South Australia and Northern Territory have connected to MHR to provide better patient and clinician experience through the seamless flow of pathology reports. ON THE RECORD “Australian specialists are world leaders in innovation – whether in clinical techniques, robotics, or medical engineering. We want to support our local clinical information system vendors to integrate the MHR into their software in a way that encourages specialists to embrace these systems in the same way they’ve embraced other technology. We won’t be specifying what changes should be made to systems. Instead, we will work vendors and their customers – the specialists themselves – to come up with designs that specialists and their practice staff will love to use, and which will benefit from the rich data provided by the My Health Record,” said Ms Bettina McMahon, Chief Operating Officer, ADHA in a statement. 

The Flinders-based team created the AI program, called Search Algorithm for Ligands, and the technology behind the vaccine itself employs adjuvants, substances that enhance the body's immune response.

The FluCARE app will undergo a one-year trial phase at up to 30 nursing homes in Sydney Local Health District, during which nursing home staff will record data about suspected cases of influenza-like illness and flu among their residents.

Patients in Far North Queensland will be able to ring up for a consultation, or book one online, and receive medical advice or have prescriptions and certificates sent to their mobile device.