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CEO Dan Burton explains what the billion-dollar mark means to the company and the industry, where its technology is headed – and where it stands on an IPO.

New recommendations aim to advance the sharing and access of health data across borders in the European Union.

In May 2018, Health Minister Dr Dzulkefly Ahmad said that the Health Ministry will be setting up an independent Health Advisory Council within 100 days to advise the ministry on strengthening healthcare delivery. The Health Advisory Council was finally established in January 2019 and “several private hospitals have expressed their wish to cooperate (with the Health Ministry)”, according to Dr Dzulkefly when he visited Ampang Hospital, a government hospital yesterday. He also added that the public-private healthcare collaboration would help public hospitals, in particular, to tackle various issues like shortage of specialists and facilities as well as heavy workload and rising cost of treatment. The Health Advisory Council’s role is to generate ideas towards empowering the nation’s healthcare system as well as assisting the government in formulating a new direction that will steer the Health Ministry to provide world-class services. Dr Dzulkefly also urged the public to undergo early screening and detection tests for cancer as the disease had become the second highest cause of death among the people in Malaysia. He said in an article by The Sun Daily that an estimated 60% of cancer cases in the country are detected at late stages, either at Stage III or IV. Last November, Dr Dzulkefly announced that the Ministry of Health is committed to ensuring that the electronic medical record system (EMR) can be realised within three years at 145 hospitals nationwide, as a way to improve the country's health service to a better level.

An Australian-developed app is combining mobile phones with telehealth principles to bring burns sufferers fast, accurate and secure specialist advice from clinicians. Telehealth researchers from CSIRO’s Australian e-Health Research Centre have collaborated with the Fiona Stanley Hospital, part of the South Metropolitan Health Service in Perth, to develop and pilot this mobile app – Mobile Image and Communication Exchange, named ‘the MICE app’ for short. As recovering from a burn can be a slow process, the Fiona Stanley Hospital runs a Burns Early Discharge Programme for patients to leave hospital and receive ongoing care from home. The MICE app is being trialed as part of this program to let a visiting nurse take photos of the patient’s wounds and send those photos to clinicians and specialists for ongoing monitoring and advice without having to visit hospital. The specialist can then take a closer look at the wound and send back real-time advice on clinical decisions and treatment through the app, enabling the visiting nurse to administer immediate care to the patient. CSIRO Senior Software Engineer Janardhan Vignarajan told HITNA that the app aims to reduce unnecessary patient wait times, enable them to receive quick and timely specialist advice, and bring efficient healthcare to remote Australians. “For people with burn injuries, getting fast and appropriate treatment is critical. But some patients live far from the closest burns specialist. So, digital technology can help bridge the gap in healthcare delivery for people who live far from medical care,” he said. “Burns can also take a long time to heal and patients need ongoing advice to support their healing process, which the app helps with.” The MICE app also complies with patient confidentiality requirements, only storing treatment advice and images in the hospital’s systems, while automatically deleting a patient’s burn photos from the phone used. “Patient’s images stored in a clinician’s private phone raises lot of issues related to confidentiality. Our MICE app has been developed with patient care in mind, while also alleviating privacy, security and data integrity concerns that come with using mobile phone images,” Vignarajan said. “The image and related diagnostic data needs to be stored and archived for future references but doesn’t need to remain on a mobile device. The MICE app solves this by allowing the records to be stored where they should be – secure within a hospital IT system. “The technology behind the app ‘talks’ to internal hospital systems and protect patient’s images, which is a huge leap towards improving Australian healthcare.” [Read more: New burns app gives instant assessment of scars | Australian developed spray-on skin for burns treatment seeks FDA approval] CSIRO Australia intends to soon extend the use of the MICE app to patients instead of just clinicians. “At this stage, our focus is to enhance communication between specialists, doctors and healthcare workers by providing the app to these health professionals. But we are working on ways to deliver this technology to patients themselves,” Vignarajan said. Vignarajan also mentioned that there’s potential for the app to reach other areas of specialist healthcare, such as wounds or dermatology. “Wounds can be monitored by viewing previous images taken from different time points. This is very important for a proper treatment. By allowing a close look at the image in an easily accessible and secure platform, the treatment can be provided efficiently without delays,” he said.

An antibiotic prescribing app developed at Capital and Coast District Health Board (DHB) has improved doctors’ adherence to prescribing guidelines. Developed by the DHB’s Infection Services with computer science students from the Victoria University of Wellington, the Empiric app gives prescribers easy mobile access to antibiotic guidelines and assists with clinical decision making. Empiric prescribing is when a doctor chooses an antibiotic before knowing exactly what micro-organisms are involved, so they prescribe according to the symptoms. Between 35–50 per cent of hospital inpatients are on antibiotics at any one time. Most large DHBs will have their own empiric antibiotic prescribing guidelines, which are often used by the smaller local DHBs. Previously these guidelines were either in a booklet or on a website, which meant doctors had to either carry a paper copy or find a computer terminal to look them up. Infection Services clinical leader Dr Michelle Balm says that while adherence to the guidelines was good, there was room for improvement. “We wanted to make it a lot easier for prescribers to make good clinical decisions about antibiotics use as close to bedside as possible,” Balm said. Empiric is automatically downloaded on to all the DHB smartphones that are given to junior doctors in place of the traditional pager. Figures show all junior doctors are using it weekly and most on a daily basis, and adherence to the guidelines has increased since the app was introduced. Doctors report that it increases confidence around prescribing. The app is also free to download on the Apple and Android app stores and has been downloaded 700 times outside the DHB. Balm says that while there are regional differences, the prescribing guidelines are broadly applicable across New Zealand, and that the DHB made Empiric freely available for anyone to use, “in the interest of transparency and to try and get a national discussion going on this topic”. Empiric takes prescribers through a set of questions to produce a personalised – rather than generic – prescription recommendation. Features include options for when a patient has an allergy and where there is a risk of multi-drug resistant organism. This article first appeared on eHealthNews.nz.

The EHR maker allegedly falsified EHR certification, neglected to fix problems it knew about and paid customers kickbacks to recommend its product to others.

The major academic health system is working with machine learning analytics vendor Splunk to create a new system to guard against misuse of controlled substances, including opioids.

New capabilities will help clinicians spot high-risk patients, prescribe opioids more safely and reduce harm, the company said.

The vendor will also show how its technology can help improve the patient experience, enable ease of use for the clinicians who interact with its EHRs and boost operating margins for health systems navigating value-based care.