Dean Koh

This implementation complements the existing use of Alcidion’s Patientrack solution and is the first step in a five-year agreement.

The latest upgrade makes it easier for people to control who sees and accesses their health information.  

The latest upgrade makes it easier for people to control who sees and accesses their health information.

A new update implemented by the Australian federal government will allow doctors, nurses and mental health practitioners to provide telehealth services, such as video conferencing, to people isolated at home due to the coronavirus. 

On March 9, the Innovation and Technology Commission (ITC) in Hong Kong launched a special call under the Public Sector Trial Scheme for projects to support product development and application of technologies for the prevention and control of COVID-19.  WHAT’S IT ABOUT The special round aims to fund trials of R&D outcomes in the local public sector relating to detection, diagnosis or surveillance of the COVID-19 virus, or reduction of the risks of infection and its spread. According to its official release, the R&D outcomes should be immediately ready for trials by government departments or the relevant public organizations to bring about benefits for the community in fighting the epidemic in the near future. The target funding recipients are local R&D centers, universities and other designated public research institutes, as well as all technology companies conducting R&D activities in Hong Kong. The funding ceiling for each project is HKD $2M in general, and a higher ceiling for individual projects may be considered if necessary and justified. Applications will be accepted from now until April 10, and more details are available here.  THE LARGER TREND Last week, Singapore-born, Boston-based digital therapeutics startup Biofourmis announced that its technology is being utilized in a remote monitoring and disease surveillance program in Hong Kong involving patients with diagnosed or suspect cases of COVID-19. The program is being administered by the University of Hong Kong.  Elsewhere in APAC, governments or public agencies are collaborating with healthtech startups to tackle the management and/or diagnosis of COVID-19. Singapore’s national HIT agency, IHiS, has worked with local healthcare AI startup Kronikare to pilot iThermo – an AI-powered temperature screening solution that screens and identifies those having or showing symptoms of fever, HealthcareITNews reported. Singapore-based Veredus Laboratories worked with the Home Team Science and Technology Agency (HTX), a statutory board under the Ministry of Home Affairs, to develop its VereCoV Detection Kit, a portable Lab-on-Chip application capable of detecting the 2019 Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) in a single test, according to MobiHealthNews report. ON THE RECORD “The aim of the call is not only to promote the realization and commercialization of local R&D outcomes, but also to encourage the public sector to use technologies for tackling the COVID-19 epidemic in Hong Kong, thereby bearing dual significance,” said an ITC spokesman in a statement. 

IoT security company Forescout has entered a strategic partnership with Medigate, a medical-device security and asset-management company, to help healthcare organizations continuously discover, identify, assess and secure all Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), IoT, operational technology (OT) and IT network connected devices. Through this new collaboration, the companies have developed an integration to bring together Medigate's in-depth IoMT visibility, anomaly detection and lifecycle-management capabilities with Forescout’s enterprise-device visibility, automated segmentation and incident-response capabilities. Forescout will also resell the Medigate Platform. WHY IT MATTERS The joint offering will utilize passive technologies to identify and classify all connected medical devices and IT assets on health delivery organization networks, including unknown and hard-to-classify devices, while minimizing disruption. It will provide valuable insights to support corporate security policies to protect biomedical devices through effective vulnerability management, anomaly and threat detection, and risk scoring.  Through this partnership, healthcare customers will be able to design and implement effective segmentation and control access to the clinical network.      THE LARGER TREND  Last December, Medigate also partnered with EHR/EMR provider Cerner, which will provide hospitals more in-depth visibility, with continuous monitoring of network activity to create a detailed inventory of connected devices, HealthcareITNews reported.  Microsegmentation is one way to manage hard-to-secure connected medical devices through the creation of small, restricted segments of network. There are tools to help automate that process, said Jonathan Langer, co-founder and CEO, Medigate in an interview with HealthcareITNews in November 2019.   ON THE RECORD “Connected medical devices represent a fast-growing threat attack vector and the lack of device manufacturer standardization and interoperability has created a significant problem for clinical care network operations,” said Pedro Abreu, Chief Product and Strategy Officer of Forescout, in statement. “The combination of Medigate’s deep knowledge of medical devices and the healthcare industry with Forescout’s breadth of device intelligence adds a new level of cohesive device insight, expertise and security for the healthcare industry.” Langer said: “The Medigate and Forescout partnership and integration provide healthcare organizations with rich contextual visibility into their IT and clinical networks, as well as sophisticated network analysis to detect threats and implement clinically-driven policies. These actionable insights will, in turn, reduce risk and improve patient safety.”

ADHA is working with RANZCR to launch the My Health Record CPD modules for clinical radiologists and imaging practices. 

Update: The HIMSS Global Conference in Orlando has been canceled due to the coronavirus. Read more here. Founded in 2016, Precision Driven Health is a research partnership between New Zealand’s health IT sector, health providers and universities, aimed at improving health outcomes through data science. Ahead of the HIMSS20 conference, Kevin Ross, CEO of the organization, talks about the significance of data in delivering value-based care and the real challenges of collaboration between different stakeholders in data. What are your thoughts on value-based care (vs the traditional fee-for-service model) and what can be done with healthcare data to create more value and personalized care for patients? Value-based care is far preferable to a fee-for-service model, as long as we agree on value, and can be transparent in our approach. At its extreme, a fee-for-service model rewards someone who takes many attempts to get it right, whereas value-based care rewards the delivery of what matters in the most efficient way. Data has a huge role to play in this, particularly in helping to define and analyze the most appropriate metrics for value.  Data allows us to use a common language for value, and can make transparent the link between the activities undertaken in healthcare, and the value that is received by consumers. When data can be shared, people can see more clearly what they are receiving, and what is having the greatest impact. A fee-for-service tends to lead toward giving the same care for everyone, as we get good at efficiently delivering a particular procedure or program.  Data science allows us to analyze what works for different people, and if the objective is to deliver value, then the world of possibilities opens up. One person may benefit from medication, while another benefits from improvements to their living circumstances; value-based care gives us a framework to consider these in a common way. As CEO of Precision Driven Health, what are some of the lessons learnt through coordinating collaborations between health professionals and data scientists in applying data science to enable precision health to become a reality? Everyone is keen to collaborate and learn from each other, but there is often a lot of work up front to establish common language and understanding. We come with our biases, and are often unaware of how much they influence our thinking and expectations. I find that most people oversimplify the role of another collaborator and assume that it will fit into their own way of viewing the world.  For example, a data scientist thinks of a clinician as having a very transactional role of translating data into a diagnosis or next decision. While this may describe some of the core information exchange in clinical care, it is in reality only a small part of what happens – and much of what happens is not captured in tidy data science language. Similarly, our clinicians often think that data science is one of two extremes – either magic (just throw some data into a pot and out will come an answer), or predictable (the data will show that if we change X then Y will be improved). A good data science process involves a lot of workshopping, trial and error, human input and compromise. What are your observations on the development of precision health in New Zealand? What opportunities do you see? New Zealand has excellent quality data, enabled through a single identifier per person, known as the National Health Index. This allows twenty years of digital records to be linked and analyzed for historical patterns. Combining this data about a diverse population with excellent data scientists, clinicians and software developers, New Zealand is well positioned to be a testbed for innovations in precision health. Having a single-payer health system also helps to ensure that the best care for an individual usually corresponds with economic benefits to the whole system.  However, despite all of these advantages, the task is still very difficult. Healthcare changes slowly, and we must build public trust for/in new uses of data, and new ways of delivering care. Our clinical carers are not trained in data science, and our data scientists are new to healthcare – so the changes that are readily seen in other industries have not yet taken hold on a large scale. How do you think the use of healthcare data has led to better health outcomes in New Zealand? Could you give us some examples? New Zealand has linked healthcare data to other government service data, including housing, education, justice. This has allowed us to understand the link between health and other social circumstances. As one example, a local health board has invested in improving the quality of homes in the neighborhood, to reduce the rates of respiratory issues caused by mold.  At the other end of the system, we have developed a localized calculator for the outcomes from elective surgery, developed based on all surgeries in the past ten years. We can now use this information for anyone considering a procedure, and explain what the outcomes are like for people like them. For minority groups who are not represented well in international studies, this allows a much better-informed conversation between surgeon, patient and family that helps to make the best long-term decisions. Kevin Ross is a panelist at the HIMSS20 AsiaPac Summit’s Panel Discussion titled Preparing Data and Redesigning Metrics for Value-Based Care, scheduled for Wednesday, March 11 from 8.30am to 9.30am in room W240C. Additional registration is required – click here for more details on the HIMSS20 AsiaPac Summit. He is also the speaker for the session titled Ethical Machine Learning scheduled for Tuesday, March 10 from 1.30pm-2.30pm in room W207C. 

An interview with Philip Daffas, CEO of PainChek.

iThermo reduces the need for manual temperature screening, and provides prompts where secondary checks can be carried out for feverish persons identified by the solution.