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According to the Department of Health and Social Care, the NHS is using around 130,000 pagers at an annual cost of £6.6m.

Deakin University has unveiled a new institute for health transformation, bringing together more than 200 multi-disciplinary researchers and industry partners to address the complex healthcare challenges of today. Speaking at the recent AFR Healthcare Summit, Deakin University Institute for Health Transformation Inaugural Director Professor Anna Peeters said the first of such an institute in Australia aims to integrate translational research in prevention and population health, health systems and services, health economics and financing, as well as data intelligence and digital health. “We need to look into how we can design systems so that we can both improve population health and at the same time, improve patient experience and reduce healthcare costs per person,” she said. “From a research perspective, we need more research into knowledge translation and implementation research. We know what makes people more well and what treats conditions, but know less well how to organise the systems to get the best patient experiences and patient outcomes in the most experienced ways. “The Institute for Health Transformation was created to try and fill some of those gaps.” The vision for the Institute for Health Transformation is to work together across different levels of partnerships – industry, governments and academia – to transform health and care. “There is a need to place solutions in a more systemic context and this context is much broader than the healthcare industry alone. We need to integrate multiple, relevant partnerships to identify these potential solutions; we don’t do it well enough yet. And we need to do it using our available resources efficiently,” Peeters said. According to Peeters, this results in a more integrated approach to research themes, as opposed to siloed and traditional perspectives. “It’s not a traditional research model; it’s not a traditional health model, nor is it a traditional government model. This integrated approach brings about a capacity for agile partnerships,” she said. “And putting the person at the centre of this is critical, whether it’s to optimise transitions in care, activate healthy populations and communities, improve health services delivery and design, or drive equity and impact.” To do that, Peeters said the institute needs strong capabilities in data and digital health, health economics, systems approaches and knowledge translation research. “To fulfill the needs of a healthcare ecosystem that we’re trying to develop, there needs to be a beneficial research ecosystem. The traditional ways of research just aren’t going to work for these issues or the modeling, commercialisation and scaling of these solutions,” she said. “The Institute for Health Transformation is an agile manner to take the solutions identified further.” [Read more: New Leukaemia Foundation research funding to prevent deaths from stem cell transplants | Garvan implements superpowered IT infrastructure to push scientific boundaries in genomics research] Peeters also said that the creation of this institute will result in the need for a newer research workforce. “There will be a need for people who have skills across multiple sectors, multiple disciplines and those with a focus on capacity building and development. That’s not how people are currently trained.” She also said that the clinical data that currently exists needs to become more easily available. “The data isn’t easily liked, it’s not easily analysed. There are a lot of protection issues that exist and a lack of official systems around how we do data IP, data sharing, etc. So, how can we free that up and develop it in a comprehensive way? “These are going to be quite critical in creating a proper framework and getting the most out of our research ecosystem.

With boots-on-the-ground experience, Sedgwick SVP Andrea Buhl said her provider experience has helped her as a payer.

The HIMSS Electronic Health Record Association's Opioid Crisis Task Force has created what it calls the "ideal minimum data set" to get physicians the right information to enable safer EPCS.

A backlogged queue of eye center patients, most for diabetic screenings, dropped from 14,000 to 3,000 within a year of implementation of the technology.

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The product features a camera to increase time to diagnosis, company says.

New figures show that one in 10 Australians have opted out of the My Health Record (MHR) system, leaving participation rates at 90.1 per cent. 

New figures show that one in 10 Australians have opted out of the My Health Record (MHR) system, leaving participation rates at 90.1 per cent. According to the Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA), based on the number of people eligible for Medicare as at 31 January, more than 2.5 million people have opted out of the system, amounting to a national opt out rate of nearly 10 per cent. This is a stark increase from the three per cent, or about 900,000 people, who opted out from when the opt-out period began in July to 9 September last year. While the opt-out period ended on 31 January, legislation was recently passed by the Australian Parliament allowing Australians to cancel and have their MHR permanently deleted from the system at any time in future. Similarly, individuals who may have opted out can choose to create a record at any stage. According to the ADHA, records created through the opt-out process will be available shortly. Just a few days ago, ADHA Chief Executive Tim Kelsey took to stage at the AFR Healthcare Summit to say that the MHR system was one of the strategies to get Australia’s digital basics right and quickly, and that more healthcare organisations are getting on board the system. “A recent report identified, quite astonishingly, that in today’s high-quality healthcare in Australia, that 1.2 million Australians will have experienced an adverse medication event in the last six months. 250,000 hospital patients are seen each year because of medications misadventure. A key cause is the absence of real-time medical records at the point of care – a key benefit of MHR,” he said at the event. According to Kelsey, more than 50 per cent of pharmacies are now uploading to MHR – an “enormous shift” from the start of the year. “What this means is comprehensive coverage. A GP will have the most up-to-date information currently available on the patient and in that way, we will reduce the number of accidental misdiagnoses,” he said. In response to the increasing Australian opt-out numbers, Labor Shadow Minister for Health and Medicare Catherine King said the implementation of an opt-out model has “created a range of problems and severely undermined public support” for a system that could deliver health benefits. “We maintain the government should commission an independent Privacy Commissioner review of the system,” King said. [Read more: We need to get the digital basics right and quickly: Tim Kelsey | My Health Record system data breaches rise] As part of the review, Labor calls for the consideration of appropriate balance between utility for clinicians, patients and others (such as carers), and privacy and security for individuals; protections for vulnerable people, including minors aged between 14 and 17 and families fleeing domestic violence; and measures to encourage consumer engagement and informed choice. Most recently, the ADHA also reported that the number of data breaches involving MHR has risen year-on-year, from 35 incidents in the last financial year to 42 incidents this year. The agency’s Annual Report 2017–18 identified that “42 data breaches (in 28 notifications) were reported to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC)… concerning potential data security or integrity breaches”, but with “no purposeful or malicious attacks compromising the integrity or security of the My Health Record system”. MHR has previously come across backlash from the industry, with Harvard Medical School International Healthcare Innovation Professor Dr John Halamka saying the system relies on outdated technology and industry calling for more caution over the system. But the ADHA defended MHR from criticisms, identifying that more than 98 per cent of the content in MHR is machine-readable, including MBS [Medicare Benefits Schedule] and PBS [Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme] data and a variety of rich clinical resources, and that only one to two per cent of the documents contained in My Health Record are PDFs. “Over 100 clinical information systems are accredited to connect to My Health Record and they consume structured data such as SNOMED [Systematised Nomenclature of Medicine] codes on diseases and AMT [Australian Medicines Terminology] codes on medicines. This functionality is driving decision support and other logic in those systems through those computable codes,” the spokesperson said.