HITWA:Western Australia’s Health, Information & Technology Conference

Consumer-centred healthcare, the use of social media and patient rights to information are set to be headline topics at HIC 2014 in Melbourne 11-14 August.

Learn from our international speaker on patient engagement. HISA is proud to introduce Dave deBronkart, one of the international key note speakers for this year’s HIC. Known on the internet as e-Patient Dave, cancer survivor deBronkart is a successful blogger for consumer health rights and the author of Let Patients Help: A Patient Engagement Handbook.

Australia’s up and coming software developers are invited to submit their concepts for innovative mobile health apps in this year’s HISA 2014 Health Apps Challenge.

The HIC 2014 program is now available. This will give you information on conference timings, speakers and presentations.

Australia's peak membership body for e-health and health informatics has welcomed the Federal Government's $140m commitment to fund the Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR) saying there is an opportunity for ongoing consultation to get the system right.

A report issued last month by Medibank has estimated the overall cost of supporting peoplewith mental illness in Australia at $28.6 billion per year.

The report found that our current mental healthcare system is fragmented anduncoordinated, making it impossible for most consumers to receive satisfactory care.

In order to achieve successful reform to address these issues, proper foundations need to be laid.
Read full release.

Certified Health Informatician Australasia (CHIA)

The Health Informatics Society of Australia (HISA), in collaboration with the Australasian College of Health Informatics (ACHI) and the Health Information Management Association of Australia (HIMAA) will launch the Certified Health Informatician Australasia certification program in July 2013. Read full release.

The importance of a health informatics literate health workforce.

Over the past decade billions have been pumped into e-health projects with barely any money invested in the e-health workforce.

This is one of the reasons listed in a new paper released by Australasian College of Health Informatics (ACHI) and Health Informatics Society of Australia (HISA) for recent failure of many high-profile e-health projects. Read full release.

A joint paper by Peter Williams, President, Australian College of Health Informatics and Dr Louise Schaper, CEO, Health Informatics Society of Australia. Read the paper.

The role of the health informatician will be formally recognised with the launch of Australia’s first certification program in health informatics.

Read the full article at australianageingagenda.com.au

Katerina Andronis has worked in healthcare IT for the last 30 years. Most recently, she has held the position of director, life sciences and healthcare industry, at Deloitte. She has also taken the position of HISA chair, something she said is motivated by her desire to help clinicians do what she terms is a "very tough job.”

Read the full article at ehealthspace.org

Senator Carr broke new ground by throwing open previously closed departmental records to researchers examining questions such as the link between prescription drugs and birth defects and the health impacts of low incomes.

Invited to open Thursday's health informatics conference when he was minister, he agreed to open the conference as backbencher after the Health Informatics Society of Australia re-issued the invitation.

Read the full article at nationaltimes.com.au

Former Australian of the Year, Dr Fiona Stanley, is using a major conference in Melbourne today to call on all governments in Australia to free up their restrictions on the huge quantities of data they collect, saying the delay in doing so is putting lives at risk.

She spoke to me just before her keynote address for the Big Data conference in Melbourne.

Listen to the interview at abc.net.au

Former minister Kim Carr has opened the Health Informatics Society of Australia’s inaugural Big Data conference with an impassioned speech about freeing up public data, urging the nation not to "squander” the "great compact between government and researchers”.

Senator Carr told the conference’s 150 delegates he believed science and research had the power to solve most of the challenges facing society, and that government was in a unique position to harness that power.

Read the full article at pulseitmagazine.com.au

Speaking today at a conference on big data in health, Department of Health & Ageing chief information and knowledge officer Paul Madden encouraged attendees to sign up to the program.

He said the $628 million e-health records project had the ability to change the game for health, with significant flow-through data from the records already being gathered.

Read the full article at itnews.com.au