by medicaltechont | Jun 16, 2018 | Technology
DeepMind’s foray into digital health services continues to raise concerns. The latest worries are voiced by a panel of external reviewers appointed by the Google-owned AI company to report on its operations after its initial data-sharing arrangements with the U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS) ran into a major public controversy in 2016.
The DeepMind Health Independent Reviewers’ 2018 report flags a series of risks and concerns, as they see it, including the potential for DeepMind Health to be able to “exert excessive monopoly power” as a result of the data access and streaming infrastructure that’s bundled with provision of the Streams app — and which, contractually, positions DeepMind as the access-controlling intermediary between the structured health data and any other third parties that might, in the future, want to offer their own digital assistance solutions to the Trust.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/15/uk-report-warns-deepmind-health-could-gain-excessive-monopoly-power/
by medicaltechont | Jun 9, 2018 | Cloud, Privacy, Security
The economic damage of a successful major cyber-attack against a large cloud services provider could be similar in scale to the financial impact of a destructive hurricane.
The destructive tropical cyclone hurricane Katrina hit the US in 2005, causing $108bn in damage — but that could be exceeded by the cost of a major cyber-attack, according to one expert.
Read more at https://www.zdnet.com/article/cloud-computing-why-a-major-cyber-attack-could-be-as-costly-as-a-hurricane/
by medicaltechont | Jun 9, 2018 | Canada, Cloud, e-Health, eHealth, Election, Electronic Medical Records, Healthcare, Hospitals, Medical Records, Technology
I have been a family physician practising in this province for 30 years. It is a great joy looking after my patients. However, looking after them in the health care quagmire of disconnected information and bureaucratic silos is becoming a nightmare. It is alarming seeing my young colleagues bewildered so early in their careers, and new graduates of family medicine are afraid to set up practice.
The province is carved up into 14 Local Health Integration Networks and 76 sub-LHINs each seemingly reinventing the wheel while consultants analyze the same things over and over again. There is an obsession with accountability frameworks designed by this ever growing bureaucracy that has little idea about what we actually do and what tools we need to do our job.
Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on a huge array of electronic repositories and information systems that don’t integrate at the most basic level with each other years after they were built. Providers spend countless hours trying to locate who does what where and what hoops to jump through to get appointments. We fax long paper forms with lab and other reports that are somehow not available from these expensive repositories. We typically access each other by phone in the absence of electronic messaging capabilities.
Read more at https://www.thespec.com/opinion-story/8651966-survival-at-the-front-lines-of-the-health-care-quagmire/
by medicaltechont | Jun 4, 2018 | Canada, Doctors, e-Health, eHealth, Electronic Medical Records, Healthcare, Ontario, Privacy, Toronto
A total of 5,063 public elementary students were suspended in Toronto this school year after getting caught in what one doctor called, a “1970s-style, cumbersome process” over immunization records.
The number of students suspended amounted to 7 per cent of the 73,262 elementary students in 586 Toronto public elementary schools assessed by Toronto Public Health from July to mid-December 2017. That’s a jump from 5.6 per cent last year.
“All of the students who were suspended either didn’t meet the immunization requirements as they were not up-to-date, their records were not filed on time, or they did not have a valid exemption,” said Dr. Vinita Dubey, associate medical officer at Toronto Public Health.
Read more at https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2018/02/14/over-5000-elementary-school-kids-suspended-in-toronto-for-out-of-date-immunization-records.html
by medicaltechont | Jun 2, 2018 | e-Health, eHealth, Ontario, Ontario MD, OntarioMD, Technology
A new partnership will benefit clients of the new Good Doctors Medical walk-in clinic that opened in Espanola last week.
OntarioMD and the Ontario Telemedicine Network (OTN) are partnering to streamline the delivery of digital health services.
Read more at https://www.myespanolanow.com/16851/ontariomd-and-ontario-telemedicine-network-digital-delivery/
