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Australia's new e-health platform crashes as people rush to opt-out

zdnet.com

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Re: Australia's new e-health platform crashes as people rush to opt-out

#61

Post by michaelt »

pimmen wrote: post #38
vertex-four wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t intentionally place my health records out of my own control, because I have significant risk to my life if those records become public. Having certain illnesses and medical history is inherently political in 2018 - being trans can result in violence against you, talking to your doctor about STIs - even just prevention - can get you kicked out of your home, having medicated/treated schizophrenia will result…

But you also have a significant risk to your life if your doctor can't get to them and orders the wrong treatment. The risk of that happening to you is actually significantly higher than dying from a lot of pretty common illnesses.

  But you also have a significant risk to your life if your
  doctor can't get to them and orders the wrong treatment.
Don't you think I'm in a better position to make that decision than a central government bureaucrat, given that I have my medical records and an incentive to protect my own privacy, and he has neither?

Re: Australia's new e-health platform crashes as people rush to opt-out

#62

Post by vertex-four »

pimmen wrote: post #38
vertex-four wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t intentionally place my health records out of my own control, because I have significant risk to my life if those records become public. Having certain illnesses and medical history is inherently political in 2018 - being trans can result in violence against you, talking to your doctor about STIs - even just prevention - can get you kicked out of your home, having medicated/treated schizophrenia will result…

But you also have a significant risk to your life if your doctor can't get to them and orders the wrong treatment. The risk of that happening to you is actually significantly higher than dying from a lot of pretty common illnesses.

Unless I’m unconscious, I can give my doctor permission to access my medical history from where it’s kept under my control, and give them a quick run-down in the meantime if necessary.

I feel that I should have a right to choose between the risk of death when both myself and my emergency contact are unable to provide medical information to a doctor, and the risk of my medical history becoming publicly available - or even just available to the Government. Forcing the latter risk on me is, imho, unethical.

Re: Australia's new e-health platform crashes as people rush to opt-out

#63

Post by auslander »

shakna wrote: post #22
rjvbk wrote: post #19

Having a centralised system with health records is bad? I've had that since I was born in my country and I think it's useful and handy. Something happens to you, they know what could've been, if you're on meds, what things and meds you're allergic to, etc. I guess the outrage makes sense when looked from an American point of view where you distrust the government by principle?

Its not the idea that Australians mistrust - its the implementation. No great technical project in the last couple decades has been successful. Under the current government we have the broken NBN, the fractured MyGov that has been repeatedly hacked, the falling over census website, other broken health care systems. We can't trust that they can build it safely.

Agree. AU Gov is failing in same way any big corporation fails. There is that strange notion that Managers know better than Engineers and can make technical Decisions.

Good engineers, who love coding, can design a big system, are unlikely to rule over the Design. It'll be bad engineers, now Managers, with good political skills, that got promoted because its their only way to survive, being otherwise useless.

It is totally upside-down, hence the mess.

Re: Australia's new e-health platform crashes as people rush to opt-out

#64

Post by lucb1e »

deevus wrote: post #53

This is a problem every time the government launches a new service. They always have "an unexpected amount of traffic". The last time we had a census the "census night" was totally bust since the majority of Australian internet users tried to use the online form and hardly anyone succeeded. They tried to blame it on "hackers". Leading up to census night there were threats of fines if you didn't submit on time, but du…

There are plenty of projects that don't have this issue. It's not "always", just the big ones so it seems like it's all of them if you don't know about the others.

Re: Australia's new e-health platform crashes as people rush to opt-out

#65

Post by sbov »

lbriner wrote: post #30

There are problems with paper-based systems but they don't affect everyone to the same extent: * I visit another doctor when on holiday - they don't have my records * Certain treatments need the approval of my home doctor, it talkes longer than it should * Harder to collate statistics that are supposed to show the state of the nation's health But there are problems with an electronic system: * A single point of attac…

You forgot one: * cancer doctor doesn't know about infection, runs chemo treatment, infection spreads and ultimately kills patient.

Happened to a relative of mine.

Re: Australia's new e-health platform crashes as people rush to opt-out

#66

Post by mb_72 »

I will be curious to see how this pans out - I have dual Australian and Estonian citizenship, and in the latter case I can tell you it's extremely useful to have centralised medical records, prescriptions etc. For my Australian medical records in MyHealth or whatever it's called, I have a couple of pages uploaded by my then cardiac doctor (after I had a suspected heart attack last November that ended up 'only' being something related to medication), and I've already used these pages with a related consultation here in Estonia. So, for me at least, this system has been quite useful already. I guess time will tell in terms of security and other important factors.

Re: Australia's new e-health platform crashes as people rush to opt-out

#67

Post by j16sdiz »

Avamander wrote: post #58
pjc50 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true "on paper", but in practice our whole industry is built on the fact that electronic records behave qualitively differently from paper records because they're so much easier to handle. You can't steal everyone 's paper records all at once in the way you can with electronic records, for example.

> You can't steal everyone's paper records all at once in the way you can with electronic records, for example. You're assuming you can steal the entire database at once which most certainly will also be noticed and stopped swiftly.

Maybe.

But how about those already stolen? Photocopying paper records are slow. If you can get the original copy back quickly, you can be quite confident they are not copied. Not so for e-records.

Re: Australia's new e-health platform crashes as people rush to opt-out

#68

Post by gruez »

Avamander wrote: post #51
gruez wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Totally the same with your data in that one primary doctor's office or whatever still, it's a huge target compared to thousands of doctor's offices >Totally same with your paper records, someone could walk in and steal your data, imagine that. nowhere near as scaleable compared to hacking a site with everyone's records

So what you're saying is that someone is going to steal the entire medical database of everyone and that's somehow going to be more "scalable" than stealing paper records? If that database contained everyone's medical data it will not fit on anything that anyone non-state/non-corporate actor can aquire, and if you have state actor or corporate level of budget one could easily scale stealing paper medical records. I'm…

>If that database contained everyone's medical data it will not fit on anything that anyone non-state/non-corporate actor can aquire

source? that might be the case if you're including all the high resolution imagery, but I'd imagine all the text records can't be that big.

>and if you have state actor or corporate level of budget one could easily scale stealing paper medical records

that would either require an operation lasting weeks/months to hit all the doctors offices (with a small crew), or hitting all tho doctors offices at the same time (huge crew). the former increases risk of detection exponentially, as someone is going to notice eventually, and once people find out, capture of your crew by the police will be inevitable. the latter is also risky because you're going to make a lot of noise assembling said crew, and one of them is going to snitch on you. in contrast, if all the records were centralized in one online database, all you'd have to do is have a small team of experienced hackers hack it from a the safety of a country with no extradition treaty. low risk of one of them snitching on you AND low risk of capture.

>I'm not so sure it's going to be easier to compromise super-guarded database compared to a lot of paper records, would like some hard numbers, but those are going to be hard to get.

I'm sure on an individual level, it's definitely easier to burgle a doctor's office than a super secure government database. but see last paragraph about scaleability.

Re: Australia's new e-health platform crashes as people rush to opt-out

#69

Post by Avamander »

gruez wrote: post #68
Avamander wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what you're saying is that someone is going to steal the entire medical database of everyone and that's somehow going to be more "scalable" than stealing paper records? If that database contained everyone's medical data it will not fit on anything that anyone non-state/non-corporate actor can aquire, and if you have state actor or corporate level of budget one could easily scale stealing paper medical records. I'm…

>If that database contained everyone's medical data it will not fit on anything that anyone non-state/non-corporate actor can aquire source? that might be the case if you're including all the high resolution imagery, but I'd imagine all the text records can't be that big. >and if you have state actor or corporate level of budget one could easily scale stealing paper medical records that would either require an operat…

> as someone is going to notice eventually

That's going to be true with the database theft too.

> All you'd have to do is have a small team of experienced hackers hack it from a the safety of a country with no extradition treaty

I'm not so sure that's won't raise any red flags anywhere (foreign IP and possibly a lot of data being transferred). Imo it should, but we can't really know?

I agree with rest of what you said though.

Re: Australia's new e-health platform crashes as people rush to opt-out

#70

Post by Avamander »

j16sdiz wrote: post #67
Avamander wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can't steal everyone's paper records all at once in the way you can with electronic records, for example. You're assuming you can steal the entire database at once which most certainly will also be noticed and stopped swiftly.

Maybe. But how about those already stolen? Photocopying paper records are slow. If you can get the original copy back quickly, you can be quite confident they are not copied. Not so for e-records.

> But how about those already stolen?

Digital records can most likely be duplicated much more easily.

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