91–100 of 112 posts
Anyone know who is the contractor running this fiasco?
Accenture, AFAIK.
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It seems overall okay if you accept the premises that A) A centralized health record system can do substantial good by improving effectiveness and transparency of healthcare processes, and enabling medical progress through data re-use. B) Doctors won't lift a finger to do extra work if they have no selfish incentive for doing so.
It's really not that much money as an incentive. Doctors won't do it unless they believe it's a good thing. Source: I'm an Australian doctor.
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It's really not that much money as an incentive. Doctors won't do it unless they believe it's a good thing. Source: I'm an Australian doctor.
What are you doing, and what is your professional organisation (the AMA) doing, to counter long wait times for doctors visits?
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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.
That's not necessarily the case. It very much depends on how it's "stolen", the cluefulness of the attackers, etc.
For example, if the data is pulled out of the live system via (say) some kind of SQL exploit, then intrusion detection gear has a possibility of noticing and reacting in a reasonable time frame.
However, if (again, for example) the data is copied directly from backup tape when the tapes are transported to secondary storage, or are (in)correctly disposed of. That's extremely unlikely to be detected. Ever.
There are just so many attack vectors. :/
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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 to…
It will be AWS, no nonsense like kubernetes, possibly a dash of OpenBSD for public layer, least privilege IAM, Cloudformation everywhere. Solid. :) Open Sourcing it is an option too.
> When citizens rush to opt out of an Australian government service, it says something about their levels of trust. When the system falls over under heavy load, it proves them right. What a stupid conclusion.
I get that there's benefit to a centralized health database if you're in a country with socialized medicine, but if dealing with private doctors, why not let the market provide this capability? My primary GP uses one version [1], and I get that there would be several competing others until some convergence happens. But at least with these private providers, if one fails or falls out of trust, patients and doctors can…
You haven’t established that the government is less trustworthy than the private providers?
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…
The census fiasco was a truly special kind of incompetence. The best inside analysis was from the folks behind the Risky Business infosec podcast: https://risky.biz/censusfail/ Summary: The project was outsourced to IBM (that alone probably says it all), who didn't purchase any DDoS protection. A small attack crashed the first firewall, and the backup firewall didn't have rules loaded. That caused IBM's monitoring to…
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And it would be much simpler if all you had to do was give them that authorization and they could retrieve your medical records in an instant, in the correct format for them to work quickly. If they have to order your medical journal from a completely separate jurisdiction, in a completely different format, and then import it that would take longer. If you require specialist care which is not available in your area t…
All at the low, low risk of creating e.g. a centralised Government database of trans people, or people with HIV, or whatever the next big scare is.
Again, just a few percent in efficiency could mean thousands upon thousands of lives saved. I'm sure a lot of HIV positive people who were mistreated would've loved that.
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I'm not saying I like the Australian take on this but I do think a central database for medical records has the potential to prevent medical treatment mistakes by a couple percent. That's thousands of people saved. At that point, I think it's something we really should discuss as a society because it would have a profound effect on the economy and public health. I don't think the idea is fundamentally flawed, I think…
Sure, and I’m participating in that discussion right now - for me, it has a high risk of seriously negatively affecting me. There’s other bits of law that I oppose for similar reasons - there’s an opportunity to do a bit better/be a bit more efficient, but at the obvious cost of seriously harming people. I think that many people don’t recognise the downsides to centralised databases vs more efficient records transfer…