Australian Federal Budget, e-health announcements

Two new ehealth initiatives have been announced as part of the Australian Federal budget. Combined they represent a move toward more detailed (smarter?) health and medicine monitoring.

eHealth — personally controlled electronic health records [AUD$466.7m]

"Australians will be able to check their medical history online through the introduction of personally controlled electronic health records, which will boost patient safety, improve health care delivery, and cut waste and duplication."

more info from the Department of Health and Aging.

Fifth Community Pharmacy Agreement [AUD$15.4b]

"The measure will also provide funding of $375.3 million over six years (including $91.8 million in 2014‑15) to implement new initiatives under the agreement. These include:

• a range of new patient‑focused pharmacy programs including patient medication monitoring (at a cost of $285.5 million);
• a 15 cent payment to pharmacists for every prescription processed electronically with a National E‑Health Transition Authority specifications (at a cost of $82.6 million); and
• collection of data on pharmaceuticals that are priced below the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme general co‑payment (currently $33.30) including patient, prescriber and dispenser demographic data (at a cost of $7.2 million)."

more from the budget papers (paper 2)

re-post: Nurses say technology can cut lost time

From the E-Health Insider

Finding missing equipment and misplaced patient records is costing the NHS an estimated £1 billion a year in wasted nurses' time. Better use of tracking technologies and electronic records have been identified by nurses as having the potential to cut waste and improve patient safety.

The UK’s 400,000 secondary care nurses are spending almost four hours each week searching for medication, patient records and medical devices according to the survey by GS1 UK, in conjunction with the Nursing Standard.

• A quarter of the 861 hospital nurses surveyed said that patient records and lab results go missing at least once a day.
• Nearly a third (31%) believed that the use of physical patient records, instead of electronic systems, are responsible for causing problems with patient care.
• Nurses said better use of tracking technology could help reduce patient safety incidents – 44% of nurses felt that bar-coded wristbands would reduce patient safety incidents by over 50%.

more

Find us at CeBit Australia

The Human Performance Improvement project will be presenting new work at CeBit Australia in Sydney in May 23-25. We'll be showing off some of out patented technologies and our latest sports algorithms. We look forward to seeing you there.

More from the NICTA events site.

Public hardware design for collecting data now online

The hardware design has been used in a number of measurement campaigns to evaluate performance of body-area-networks on and around the human body.

Details of the set-up and the PCB layout are available from the NICTA project page. We expect that as the standardization process moves forward, there will be a need to also standardize the measurement and modeling approaches used. Public hardware and data sets are an important part of this process.

Update on the IEEE Body-Area-Networks standard

The Body-Area-Network standard IEEE 802.15.6 has moved a step closer to completion. The four draft documents have now combined into a single draft standard. This draft will be discussed at the upcoming meeting in May.

Public data set for radio modeling around the human body released

We have just released our first dataset, of real radio measurements on a human subject, whilst they undertook everyday activities. The details include office work, driving home, cooking and watching television. 

The dataset is available from the HPI project website

Eric Topol: The wireless future of medicine

Eric Topol says we'll soon use our smartphones to monitor our vital signs and chronic conditions. At TEDMED, he highlights several of the most important wireless devices in medicine's future -- all helping to keep more of us out of hospital beds.

Much of the new data is likely to be streamed via wireless networks to and from smart phones, from small sensors in and around the human body. See the TED talk for more info.