Peter Birch of Talking Health Tech and MetaOptima fame (see article in this newsletter on Dermtech) chats through the history of Best Practice, which is probably the market leader in Patient Management Software in the country. See also our article on platforms and MedicalDirector, which Dr Pyefinch also founded for good context. CLICK HERE for […]
Peter Birch of Talking Health Tech and MetaOptima fame (see article in this newsletter on Dermtech) chats through the history of Best Practice, which is probably the market leader in Patient Management Software in the country. See also our article on platforms and MedicalDirector, which Dr Pyefinch also founded for good context.
CLICK HERE for more Talking Health Tech interviews with Peter
Submit a comment
Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *
Publisher Jeremy Knibbs talks to Hyland Healthcare’s Peter Weston about how a hospital can access its current imaging system, and the ROI for the hospital and patient care in developing an enterprise wide imaging solution.
The healthcare sector presents a tempting target for cyber attackers, but defending yourself and your business is a lot easier than getting your black belt in karate.
Maryborough District Health Service has rolled out Telstra Health’s Virtual Health Monitoring for monitoring the health and wellbeing of its patients remotely.
Medical media has for years engaged doctors via journalism and storytelling, funded mainly by pharma advertising. Now it wants to go upstream – what might that mean for doctors?
The University of Melbourne has unveiled its new Centre for Digital Transformation of Health, which seeks to bridge the divide between tech and patients.
How a simple idea, executed sharply within our now rapidly changing digital health ecosystem, might give patients another reason to love their GP and GPs valuable insight into their patient's script fulfilment behaviour.
While some nations are investing heavily in AI, Australia seems largely comfortable being a data primary producer and algorithm importer – which may not be a safe place.
The last straw for the My Health Record (MHR) surely arrived this week with an FOI revelation that all the research the ADHA has done to prove to us the worth of this $2 billion…
Removing barriers to health services and better supporting patients on their health journey is now closer to being achieved at Goondir Health Services in Queensland with the roll out of Telstra Health’s Virtual Health Service…
When a specialty cancer hospital became part of the Parkville precinct that included the Royal Melbourne Hospital, leaders wanted to implement a common electronic medical record (EMR) system, a move that would enable the provider…
Electronic Medical Record (EMR) solutions can be a big step towards transforming a healthcare provider. But an EMR alone as a digital solution will not generally get an organisation far.
Epilepsy is usually portrayed in the movies as a grand mal seizure, with the actor dropping to the floor, losing consciousness, and violently convulsing.
It’s hard to imagine a period in the history of general practice when so much change, so much stress and so many challenges were afoot at the same time.
Medical practitioners would like access to more clinical decision support solutions in order to improve diagnostic accuracy and support new flexible models of patient care, a new survey has found.
Everything is pointing to the use of video in telehealth by GPs going significantly up from its miserly current 3% of all telehealth calls. Should you be a bit better prepared?
AI has promised humankind many things – self-driving cars, intelligent fridges, droid dogs – but the deliverance from painful colonoscopies might be the best use of robots yet.
Australia’s health and aged care sectors have been fragmentally digitised for a number of years and, as a partner to some of the largest health and care providers, at Telstra Health we have seen a…
Australian Healthcare Software provider Global Health Limited (ASX: GLH) (“Global Health” or “Company”) is pleased to announce a new partnership of the Company’s Lifecard consumer health platform with Asthma Australia.
As a sort of diversion from our normal fare of COVID-19, government, the regulators and medical college guts and gore, this week we thought you might be interested in why medical technology companies are suddenly…
The COVID-19 crisis has launched us into a new era of telehealth, with very little warning. As the pandemic drags on into October there has been much discussion about its impact on the future of…
Amid the forest of hoo haa around this week's “game changer” (read, election-winning) budget, Greg Hunt seems to have confirmed formally for the first time that telehealth is now a permanent fixture of Medicare.
The impending immunisation program for COVID-19 is an opportunity to capitalise on digital health infrastructure Australia has put in place over recent years.
An exodus of office workers from Australia’s cities fiscally crippled centrally located practices, but accountants who manage healthcare finances say business is booming in suburban waiting rooms.
Doctors could become the gatekeepers of e-cigarettes under a proposal by the TGA to make the nicotine-containing versions available in Australia by prescription by June 2021.
A six month pause on current telehealth settings isn't much time for government, doctors and tech vendors to work out the right settings and prepare for a future that has changed forever
Bulk-billed telehealth has been thrown a six-month life line, with federal Health Minister Greg Hunt announcing the Medicare item numbers will continue past their original 30 September deadline.
A trio of Queensland GPs who have fallen foul of the Professional Services Review while working for an after-hours medical deputising service say their employer needs to take some responsibility for the allegations of inappropriate…
General practitioners across Australia have welcomed a last-minute extension to Medicare-subsidised telehealth, but women’s sexual and reproductive health services have missed out yet again.
The RACGP has expressed concerns over the Active Script List, which could allow any participating pharmacy to see medications a patient may want to keep discreet.
Following the successful introduction of the Medtasker clinical task management system by Telstra Health at Royal Hobart Hospital’s Emergency Department, the solution is being rolled out to other teams within the hospital.
One suspects the new Australian Digital Health Agency CEO appointment puts a fairly substantive full stop on the exciting but eventual car crash experiment that was the ADHA and the opt-in My Health Record. What…
Big money is circling general practice at a time when technology can actually be a transformational tool. But does big money really understand how complex healthcare and GPs are?
If you’re managing a lot of data in your health organisation, you will end up going cloud sooner or later in one way or another. Here are 10 common questions answered for organisations that are…
The question of how to combine the human side of healthcare with increasingly digitised systems was one of the main points raised in Wild Health’s recent webinar about patient data, device integration, predictive analytics and…
Three leading VC firms in conversation with Peter Birch from TalkingHealthTech on the new era in digital health transformation and investment post COVID
Nearly 80 percent of clinically relevant content lives outside the EMR. Integrate siloed systems with the EMR to see your whole patient. Hyland Healthcare can help.
Mater Misericordiae Ltd was searching for a better way to get patient information into the hands of its clinicians quickly and completely. It succeeded with OnBase.
The safeguards that would ideally be put in place before launching medicine into cyberspace have largely been ignored during the COVID emergency. Do we need to be worried?
The $2 billion My Health Record has largely been MIA during COVID-19 while the idea to allow doctors use their phone to do a consult may end up as the catalyst for health system transformation.
The national rollout of eScripts has experienced a false start, with the Australian Digital Health Agency asking GP software companies to remove the electronic prescribing functionality that was only launched in late July.
Prescriptions will soon name drug's active ingredients by default, rather than brand names, in a move aimed at reducing medication errors and saving the health system money.
As the emergency of the COVID pandemic eventually fades and the collaboration dynamic that has led to so much progress in digital health naturally recalibrates, what fundamental changes in our approach to regulation, collaboration and…
In this podcast, Medical Republic publisher Jeremy Knibbs chats to Equinix Australia managing director Guy Danskine about the rapid rise of cloud exchanges and co location services in data management in healthcare and when and…
Dr Karen Price is a GP on a social mission. So much so she help found one of Australia's most influential doctor social media networks, GPs Down Under (GPDU), which is now over 8,000 GPs…
A serious collateral complication of the eclectic nature of how we are building digital capability in Australian hospitals is the waste, confusion and fatigue that care teams can encounter as a result of the burgeoning…
When worst-case scenarios start unfolding, as they have recently in Victoria, even politicians realise they need to accept some responsibility and blame.
The president of the RACGP, Dr Harry Nespolon passed away on Sunday night night after nine months with pancreatic cancer. He leaves behind a wife and two young daughters.
Wild Health asks four of Australia’s leading digital health influencers what changes created by COVID-19 are here to stay, why, and what is likely to be reigned back in by government
The COVID-19 pandemic has presented a myriad of uncertainties, particularly for the most vulnerable groups in our communities. Clear and frequent communication has arguably never been more vital.
One hundred and forty-four years after the invention of the telephone, that magical technology has at last been fully, officially integrated into our health system.
When Florence Nightingale stepped into Scutari military hospital in Constantinople (Istanbul) in 1856 to assist with the Crimean war effort she was met with a scene of chaos.
Bettina McMahon accepted the role of interim CEO of the Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA) in February, with no idea that that she would be leading the organisation through the biggest disruption to digital health…
Sexual and reproductive healthcare groups are calling on the government not to halt telehealth funding for their services, saying it will hinder access.
After three months of the Morrison government touting the COVIDSafe app as a “sunscreen” for the coronavirus pandemic, some GPs say they still wouldn’t waste their breath recommending it to patients.
If there could be a silver lining to the disaster that is COVID-19 (there probably can’t) it is that with no place to hide the government is generally being smart, practical and efficient in how…
Telehealth, though nominally a temporary fix of the pandemic, is revealing deep rifts in the general practice community over where the profession goes from here and how.
Wild Health's free expert webinar series looked at COVID-19 and digital health with three major digital health influencers, building knowledge based collaboration at scale in life science research and trends in digital hospital patient management…
Ambulatory blood pressure monitoring devices look set to be publicly funded, in a move that could curb both the under- and over-diagnosis of hypertension.
While some health providers have been able to transition to telehealth with minimal disruption, Avaana CEO Rohan Pardasani says that many high-contact practitioners have been left with few options.
Whilst COVID-19 has seen other software providers and even the government rapidly turning to the cloud, Best Practice are taking a more considered approach as they develop their app and cloud-based service.
Before the COVID-19 crisis hit, NPS MedicineWise had the option for GPs to meet with educators online instead of face-to-face, but, over the past few months, the number of virtual visits has increased by around…
Allergy Pal from the Murdoch Children's Research Institute), CareMonitor, Oculo, FRED IT's WhatsApp electronic prescribing solution and Disease Tracker by PenCS, are all inaugural winners of The Australian Digital Health Agency's Innovation Challenge
Specialists will now have access to the same system that some GPs use to manage patient bookings online, as HotDoc and Genie launch their new system for specialists.
Elsevier Health is launching a series of webinars looking at the transformation of nursing, particularly in the light of changes in digital health and education post COVID-19.
Leading telehealth provider, Healthdirect Australia and MediRecords, Australia's fast growing cloud patient management system vendor, joined together to deliver the National Coronavirus Helpline in just a few days.
Six reasons why things will never go back to the way they were in digital health, and how we could still manage to squander such an opportunity if we’re not careful.
COVID-19 has put a spanner in the works for medical conference organisers, but the RACGP is not letting the virus put a stop to its major education and networking event.
The introduction of telehealth was a stand-out success of the health response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Expansion of telehealth should be part of the new normal, but this should not simply be a roll-over of…
A heartening and perhaps surprising revelation from COVID-19 is that government has been harbouring a lot of latent talent for rapid and effective digital innovation and implementation. Can we somehow leverage that moving forward?
Wild Health publisher Jeremy Knibbs is joined by GP leaders in digital health - Dr Amandeep Hansra and Dr Nathan Pinskier, Dr Mukesh Haikerwal, and Dr Harry Nespolon, the president of the RACGP, to discuss…
Register now for Wild Health Melbourne for FREE and either get 40% off the live summit price if we go ahead with a live summit, or retain your registration as FREE entry to Wild Health's…
This strange video has surfaced promoting MedicalDirector’s new integrated telehealth offering alongside a somewhat confusing announcement by the government to upgrade GP internet access for free via the NBN
Ever nimble, Peter Birch from Talking Health Tech ran a panel of four software company founder/CEOs just last week to gauge how much work they've done on for the COVID-19 induced telehealth changes, and what…
Technology changes thrust upon the primary care sector, especially telehealth, may result in seismic structural changes to the sector by the time the crisis is over
COVID-19 distress has let our GPs, software vendors, pharma companies and government to be suddenly move oceans and more innovative and pragmatic about how they deliver services
This was our Saturday post for our daily GP newsletter, but interestingly, many of the stories relate to innovation created by COVID-19. Other stories, like the NSW Health Cruise Ship debacle, are just a bit…
Melbourne's Wild Health on June 2 at Collins Square has the most interest and edgy program of all the Wild Health Sumits to date with headline keynotes from Aashima Gupta, Google Global Head of Cloud…
Telstra Health, once had the grand ambition to be ‘the’ Australian digital health platform. And then things went a bit awry. Now the group is stable, growing and winning interesting national digital health contracts. do…
Various GP groups, including the RACGP, are asking the state and federal governments to temporarily relax legislation around the current e-prescription infrastructure, to allow doctors to prescribe for COVID-19 and self-isolated patients using telehealth.
Is this a sign that digital health has finally hit the big time, or is it just more PR fun and games amid the from the enigmatic and strange US president
The Department of Human Services has decided to release the guidelines governing the disclosure of private health data to the police, one year after rejecting a Freedom of Information request by our sister publication, The Medical…
Another potential candidate in our series looking at what companies in digital health might end up as being the major platform around which national health could transact
Guess which company tops Slate.com's annual list of the 30 most evil technology led corporations? The same one that pharmacists are now very worried about in Australia.
The recruitment process for a new Australian Digital Health Agency CEO started in earnest this week with this ad from search firm Watermark. What are we to expect of this process and are there any…
The’yes’ vote on the merger of the Health Informatics Society of Australia (HISA) with the Australian College of Health Informatics (ACHI) just prior to Xmas last year signals some likely major shifts in the profile…
Yesterday the ADHA announced that yet to be decided standards for secure messaging will in future be mandatory for government procurement, a stake in the ground, which although maybe a long way off, may belie…
Researchers at CSIRO’s Data61 are looking at how how social media might form part of an early-warning system for such rapidly developing asthma outbreaks as thunderstorm asthma
Next in our continuing series on the top 10 companies that have the most potential to make it as a true healthcare platform business over the next 5-10 years
A guest post by Dr Marcus Tan, CEO of HealthEngine, clarifying some points made in our article last month on Top 10 platforms which looked at both HealthEngine and Hotdoc
Peter Birch of Talking Health Tech and MetaOptima fame (see article in this newsletter on Dermtech) chats through the history of Best Practice, which is probably the market leader in Patient Management Software in the…
Healthcare has begun to lurch towards the era of open system, APIs and digital platform based connectivity. This is a new ecosystem where data rules and where typically, only a few major platforms will end…
Health tech officionada, Peter Birch of MetaOptima talks deep and meaningful on the future of health innovation and funding in Australia with Medical Director CEO, Matt Bardsley
GP bodies remain uneasy with data-sharing arrangements under the Practice Incentive Payment – Quality Improvement, despite having won a reprieve of sorts without sacrificing the payments promised.
The DoD healthcare system contract might provide us with a view of what we could do in a connected healthcare system which is free of complex market factors such as vendor commercial imperatives, state vs…
Now the dust has settled on the federal election, everyone seems to be getting used to a government they didn’t think they’d have. With no change in government, the ADHA is ramping up its core…
SPONSORED The BP Premier summit, to be held at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre between May 22 and May 24 next year, might be the most interesting gathering of BP users yet, with the market-leading software…
HealthEngine has made bad mistakes and mishandled its response to its patient data handling crisis, but the timing of the ACCC action against the company and the tone of its attack feel very convenient
Although well intentioned, the new PIP QI regime exposes a federal government that is underestimating the massive damage that could be done to the well being of their frontline healthcare troops in general practice and…
Pathology giants, Sullivan Nicolaides (SNP), are now routinely uploading diagnostic test reports to patients’ My Health Record (MHR). The size and scale of the SNP set up marks an important new, and long promised, information…
In part 3 of neat start ups set to go places we look at one of the leading plays attempting to digitise all real time payments within the health ecosystem
If you're interested in the gory detail here is the near full video of the ehealth data sharing standards and governance debate from last month's Wild Health Summit in Sydney.
In part 2 of our ‘neat start ups’ series, we look at DermEngine, a simple application of AI and cloud based technology that might transform how we assess and treat skin cancer
Angst over the need for Australia to develop and introduce suitable governance and standards for the delivery of ehealth products and data sharing might be misplaced. The market, led by powerful government procurement and commissioning…
Migration from not so interoperable and older closed architectures to ones which are more flexible, open, web based and interoperable, may no longer be a matter of waiting things out to see how the market…
If Matiu Bush’s One Good Street initiative could scale, and it looks like it could, it’s simple but brilliant logic, could end up having an ROI for our health system that would leave your average…
A smartphone app that analyses the sound of coughs is proving to be a successful diagnostic tool in the assessment of paediatric respiratory conditions, researchers say.
Dig deep into just who might have access to your My Health Record and you find it gets a little grey at some point. Will the public be understanding of the practicalities of having certain…
Patient centric is a fatigued term and we need to get more realistic about what we could and should do in the context of a very complex and risky system
Who'd have thought that accounting software might be the first thing you'd consider if you wanted an immediate and large increase to your practice efficiency and profitability. The first in our new series on neat…
SPONSORED: Best Practice, one of Australia's leading patient management systems, is launching a patient app that is likely to significantly change the doctor-patient communication dynamic across it's broad footprint of practices
The Medical Republic brings you the highlights from the Wild Health Summit, including how we might efficiently streamline the transition of our healthcare system from acute care to chronic care.
GPs know there are potential benefits of recommending smartphone apps to patients but need professional guidance to avoid their consult feeling like a “Telstra shop,” a study says.
Tess Van De Rijt i,CEO and Founder of Patient Connector, will be one of our four showcase start ups to pitch to the audience at next weeks Wild Health Summit in Sydney
Tim Blake of Semantic Consulting, a leading digital health consultancy, chats to Wild Health about why Australian governments and healthcare providers might be very slow to board the digital health transformation bus, and what that…
One of our iconic medical AI experts warns that AI is finally impacting the frontline of medicine seriously, with all its potential for good and bad outcomes but it’s such a hyped topic, Australia might…
Technology has already delivered impressive improvements to the way in which healthcare is delivered in Australia – but the opportunity to do more is enormous. In this sponsored post Equinix Australia managing director, Jeremy Deutsch,…
Medical AI is here according to Prof Enrico Coiera of the Australian Alliance of Artificial Intelligence In Healthcare (AAAIH). Is that a good or bad thing?
The COO of the Australian Digital Health Agency, Bettina McMahon, talks to the challenges of their secure messaging program and its context as the Agency rolls into its consultation phase for a much broader attempt…
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”. It’s a cliché that more than a few of my old bosses in corporate used on me during strategy, reforecasting and budget sessions. It was usually…
Our first podcast, albeit borrowed from talkinghealthtech.com.au, a new Australian health tech podcast by Peter Birch. Grahame explains the origins of FHIR and where it's heading. It's much better listening than reading!
Australia’s medical software industry, though peppered with some great talent, interesting start ups, and high potential emerging software platform plays, isn’t where you’d normally be looking for our next IT unicorn. But we may just…
Big bold new digital hospitals might be to our future healthcare needs what, to some extent, coal fired power stations ended up becoming for our energy sector
Telstra Health, once plagued by issues of strategic discontinuity and then by its National Cancer Screening Registry contract with the Federal Government, appears to be emerging into a new and productive phase of continuity and…
Augh. Not secure messaging again? Ex Healthlink CEO Tom Bowden has a confession to make, an offer we surely can’t refuse, and some practical tips for how our digital health Agency might crack our ongoing…
If you expected something more from a political debate on health policy than volleys of talking points and dollar figures, interspersed by a little light sledging, then you must be new here.
If the various key stakeholders in secure messaging really walked the talk on this vital part of healthcare interoperability in Australia, why do we have virtually no progress in the last decade? Something fundamental is…
Of the many roadblocks involved in unleashing the potential of digital health to transform healthcare, a key one is clinician buy-in. What if more doctors with a creative bent were attracted to a career in…
Many potential pitfalls in the transformation of a health system are avoidable, provided they are recognised early. Australia needs to proceed incrementally, learning as we go and tolerating error.
How do we take our current and somewhat vaguely expressed desire for improvement in interoperability in Australia, and turn it into something real? Fast Interoperability Healthcare Resource (FHIR) founder, Grahame Grieve, has some ideas.
EMRs, the MHR, interoperability, the patient-centric imperative? Digital health has so far promised big and delivered little, especially at the coalface of health, general practice.
Have the rumours of the death of desktop PMS for GPs and specialists, in the wake of 'the cloud',been greatly exaggerated? The recent troubles at major PMS vendor Medical Director, and among some of the…
The US governments proposal to force providers and vendors to stop information would mean FHIR gets mandated as the health sharing standard across the US, and force others around the world to look at whether…
If you haven't caught up with this recent tome on the painful history of EMRs in the US, here's your chance. Reproduced with permission from Kaiser Health News
Australia’s approach to evolving healthcare web sharing standard Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) looks more strategically isolated following the US government’s recent proposal to mandate it as a platform for all health data sharing standards…
Wild Health Irregular Insights is a new health tech and innovation newsletter focussing on industry led insights, opinions and analysis for Australian health technology professionals
There's a big difference between being a medical authority and a medical influencer. You can be both but the web and social media are blurring the lines with some likely fallout
At last year’s senate hearings into the My Health Record (MHR) one of the star witnesses for the defence (the defence of the MHR that is), was the Australian Digital Health Agency’s (ADHA) chief operating…
Thousands of records containing sensitive information such as HIV-status, past abortions and mental health issues are being requested by the police every year – and doctors and privacy experts are deeply concerned about it.
GP patient management software giant MedicalDirector has restructured its business significantly, letting go as many 14 staff members, according to sources.
What if your patients told you a lot of useful stuff before they sat down with you? And when they eventually walked in, you’d already read a summary of who they are, what they think…
Did the Hello Health RACGP debacle bring the long time RACGP commercial manager Craig Martin undone? If you’re trying to slide something under the media radar, then the twilight zone between Christmas and New Year…
Just before Xmas , the medical software industry of Australia put a very large and potentially game-changing stake in the ground, which may have a very positive impact on doctors (and patients) around the country…
An examination of the legislation underpinning Medicare Australia has revealed that the precedent for the police accessing MyHealthRecord without a warrant was set a long time ago. Medicare Australia is legally allowed to share linked…
If you think you’ve got a bad case of the travel bug, get this: Dr. John Halamka travels 400,000 miles a year. That’s equivalent to fully circling the globe 16 times.
Spend enough time in the tech infosphere and you’ll find that there’s no shortage of confidence in the ability of technology to make us better as humans.
Last week’s MHR senate inquiry spent a lot of time trying to understand what some of the numbers meant. There were so many numbers in such confusing context you got the feeling the ADHA apparatchiks…
Doctors, particularly GPs, are at the epicentre of our evolving digital health landscape. But will they be gatekeepers or pawns in an evolving Game of Thrones around control of information and data distribution in the sector?
In a now-famous experiment in the 1970s, mothers were asked to sit across from their seated infants, but instead of saying "hello", smiling or cooing, the mothers were told to remain expressionless and unresponsive.
A couple of months ago the announcement that patient cloud management system start-up MediRecords had won the contract to replace the PMS of visiting doctors in Queensland Health who also practise privately, seemed to pass…
Seven years after specialists were granted rebates for remote telehealth consultations, rural GPs hope their time has finally arrived to break the access barrier for patients in the bush.
Since the period for opting out of My Health Record began on July 16, experts in health, privacy and IT have raised concerns about the security and privacy protections of the system, and the legislation…
The MHR opt out launched on Monday to a raft of consumer media interviews which reveal a disturbing lack of understanding of some key issues underlying the project.
The messages embedded in popular mental health apps may be alienating and burdening people experiencing significant psychological difficulties, while medicalising the normal ups and downs of life, researchers say.
Submit a comment
Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *
There are 0 comments