Government, Health and Education

[Steve Bennett]

CENTRELINK will use GPS-enabled phones and RSS feeds to improve its response to disasters such as the recent Victorian bushfires and Queensland floods.

The original post is here.

[Steve Bennett]

From ARNet:

NSC helps HCF analyse calls
Verint technology implementation to allow the health insurer to take better advantage of the calls placed to its call centre
Matthew Sainsbury 01 April, 2009 10:52:00

Communications integrator, NSC Group, has announced the implementation of a speech analytics solution for health insurance company, HCF.

The solution involves vendor, Verint’s technology, an incorporated data mining and speech analytics module that provides business intelligence from the recorded voices of customers.

NSC has been managing HCF’s communications requirements since it first implemented the health insurance agency’s call centres in 2003.

NSC CEO, Craig Neil, said the implementation was the first of its kind in Australia for the group.

“It went in very smoothly considering the complexity,” he said. “We’ve got a few other speech analytics solutions going in this year – we’re halfway complete with a utility company, and will have a half dozen implementations done before Christmas.”

NSC offered the solution to HCF, Neil said, quoting a time saving of 15 to 20 seconds per call as a result of the solution. In a release, HCF claimed it was seeing a 40 second saving per call.

“The solution allows an organisation to gather information that points to a problem,” Neil said. “If a lot of customers are reporting a similar problem, the analytics tool will show it through a report, allowing the organisation to make appropriate reviews.”

[Steve Bennett]

From Government News Magazine:

VICTORIAN COUNCILS CALL FOR MORE ICT SERVICE SUPPORT

By Branko Miletic

Victorian councils have appealed for more private sector support in the supply of IT services.

31 Victorian councils are calling for private technology vendors to ramp up the supply of a number of ICT shared services to all of their core customer service operations.

According to the Municipal Association of Victoria (MAV), councils are looking for companies which can provide an “ongoing operation of ICT infrastructure, business applications and enterprise content management services, as well as support for various service operations”.

The support services include products such as Windows Vista, XP and 2000, Windows Server, along with messaging services for products such as Exchange 2003 and 2007, Windows Mobile and database and business intelligence services for SQL 2000.

A recent report by PricewaterhouseCoopers found that local councils were struggling to meet the increasing costs of their customer service and ICT implementation commitments – a problem made worse in rural areas where there was a need for more customer interfacing but a cost for getting ICT contractors into the field.

MAV said that the problem was by no means confined to rural and regional councils.

“Whilst financial concerns are a significant problem, the drivers of change are the potentially adverse consequences this has on the quality and responsiveness of council services, for example, in planning, community health, child care, road maintenance and the provision of cultural and sporting facilities,” a MAV spokeswoman said.

“Typically on an ICT project of about $10 million, a shared model gives savings of up to $1.5 million.”

According to MAV CEO Rob Spence Victorian councils successfully negotiated, along with the MAV, a flexible whole of local government enterprise agreement with Microsoft in 2008.

“The $13 million agreement will deliver estimated cost savings of $1.8 million over three years,” Spence said.

“The benefits have extended to smaller councils who usually cannot access these aggregated arrangements with Microsoft because of size.

“A sound ICT infrastructure and services platform is seen as an essential foundation to enable many of the proposed shared services initiatives.”
[Mon 30/03/2009 01:10:10]

[Steve Bennett]

From ZDNet Australia:

Ombudsman targets 'outdated' Vic Police IT
Suzanne Tindal, ZDNet.com.au
30 March 2009 11:27 AM

Victorian Ombudsman George Brouwer has started an investigation into the Victorian Police's IT department and what he has described as its "outdated information technologies that are unsuited to a 21st century approach to policing".

Outdated information technologies that are unsuited to a 21st century approach to policing
Vic Ombudsman George Brouwer
A spokesperson for the Ombudsman confirmed that an investigation had begun, but was unable to specify what it was specifically targeting or who had requested it.

The Victorian IT department has suffered a significant amount of scrutiny recently. The Ombudsman already tabled a report earlier this month on Victorian crime statistics which called for "significant modernising" of the force's information technology systems.

"Foremost amongst the issues identified by my investigation are the antiquated, time-consuming administrative practices for recording crime that are followed by 'frontline' police and the outdated information technologies that are unsuited to a 21st century approach to policing," the Ombudsman wrote in his report.

"I am concerned that Victoria Police continues to miss opportunities to modernise its practices in these areas," he said.

The Ombudsman identified a list of weaknesses in the Victorian Police's systems including incompatible systems, impeded information sharing, uncoordinated management information, variation in user interfaces, lack of common data standards, inability to link business intelligence with factual information about incidents.

A spokesperson for Victoria Police said it was aware of the issues the report had been targeting, and was in the process of modernising its IT systems. It had received a "substantial" amount of money from the government to replace its database LEAP and was introducing a new HR system.

Documents leaked to the Sunday Age recently also revealed that there was a high risk of police losing information because of the amounts of data being stored on servers outside the police centre and a high risk of power outages in the police's IT centres.

State opposition leader Ted Baillieu called for the Police Minister Bob Cameron to guarantee police systems were secure, with no response.

A report by an independent consultant called SAHA, leaked to the Australian in January, said that the department had blown its IT budget by $89 million due to cost overruns.

Victoria Police has reviewed the assertions made in the report. It had been made using false assumptions, according to the Victoria Police spokesperson. "It has been identified that the report was developed using information and assumptions that are no longer valid."

Although there was a budget discrepancy at the police's IT department, it was significantly less than $89 million, the spokesperson said.

"Much of this discrepancy is due to BITS previously supplying other departments with funds for IT related purchases. There has also been an increase in the total IT spend for 2008-09 as a result of a large number of IT projects reaching cost maturity in this year. Victoria Police believes these costs increases are manageable," the spokesperson said.

That news had come after Victorian Police CIO Valda Berzins left last October amid news her department was undergoing an investigation. A board of management had been put in place to rule in her stead.

[admin]

Veterans' data riddled with errors, says

Australian IT | Andew Colley | April 28, 2009

THE national auditor has questioned the integrity of Department of Veterans' Affairs income support payments as a result of its record management system modification stalling.

The Australian National Audit Office in a report last week recommended major improvements to the department's IT governance practices after identifying thousands of incomplete or inaccurate client records on its systems.

The report finds also that the agency's IT modernisation program, which involved moving its records from legacy mainframes to newer systems and software, had stalled, with no changeover date in sight.

The department distributed about $45 million in pension income-support payments to veterans and their surviving dependents last financial year.

It has about 1.5 million clients on its books, of which only about 317,000 are active.

A spokesman for Veterans' Affairs Minister Alan Griffin said the office had found no evidence that veterans or their dependants had been paid incorrectly or denied payments. The department was, however, unable to provide a spokesperson prepared to make more detailed official comments about the ANAO report.

The report questions the department's ability to make reliable decisions.

It also discovered what it describes as "data anomalies".

An example is 438 clients older than 130 on the department's books, with no recorded date of death.

Among other problems with client records, the ANAO found 24,820 clients had been assigned multiple identification numbers.

That was an increase from about 16,983 multiple numbers discovered in a 2004 audit by the ANAO.

According to the office, most of the problem identification numbers related to inactive client records but "the results highlight the potential for poor data to affect the efficiency and reliability of DVA's decision-making".

The office was particularly critical of the department's management of 2500 active records missing crucial information about relatives.

At least part of the problem with the department's records relate to its troubled IT modernisation program, called oneDVA, which began in 2005. In 2006 the department began migrating data from its heritage system (known as the Ad Hoc Inquiry System 2000 or AIS 2000) to a newer system called Curam.

It had intended to switch to the new system and make it the authoritative source of information under oneDVA.

It is understood the department paid $15 million for Curam and services to migrate data to it, but the process struck problems and in April 2007 a $90 million contract was signed with IBM to maintain its heritage systems alongside Curam.

"Despite DVA's considerable project planning, data testing and cleansing to prepare the heritage data for transfer into Curam, unanticipated data incompatibility and integration issues emerged during the migration of the data," the ANAO report says.

"To enable the transfer of the data into Curam, heritage records with blank date-of-birth fields were populated by DVA with dummy data."

The department is yet to provide the ANAO with a date when the migration process will be complete.

[admin]

Queensland driving licences get smart

AustralianIT | Karen Dearne | April 23, 2009

UNISYS Australia has won a contract to supply a facial imaging system to support Queensland's new smartcard drivers' licences.

The state's 3 million motorists will be the first in Australia to be issued with a digital licence, replacing the present laminated documents produced on obsolete equipment dating back to the mid-1980s.

The new licence card will contain an embedded computer chip holding a copy of the facial image and personal information shown on the card, although for the first time a person's residential address will not be on the face of the card; instead it will be stored on the chip for personal safety reasons.

Private information will be protected by a PIN chosen by the user, although transport authorities will be able to override this for enforcement purposes, or to obtain access in the event of emergencies.

Under the five-year deal with Queensland Transport, Unisys will act as prime contractor for facial image-capture cameras, the facial verification database system and case management software and services. The value of the contract was not revealed.

Unisys will deliver the Cognitec facial image recognition software - used by the federal Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade for Australian passports - so QT can match people's photos against existing images held in the database, to prevent individuals applying for licences under different names.

Technology partner Daon will provide the biometric enrolment technology and middleware software, while card-maker Leigh Mardon will supply customer interface devices that allow for the capture of a signature, a security PIN and other private information to be stored on the card, such as emergency contact details

About 370 "purpose-built image capture devices", incorporating a camera and lights built into a unit, will be deployed at QT customer service centres around Queensland, and in police stations in rural and remote areas, according to Unisys managing partner Allen Koehn.

QT spokeswoman Judy Oswin said the digital licence would be harder to forge or alter, and would help reduce the risk of identity theft.

"It will also allow us to deliver services in a more convenient manner as licence holders will be able to use a card reader or the Queensland Transport website to view, update and transact on their licence and registration themselves," she said.

However, the adoption of passport-strength security systems for driver's licences has been controversial, with the scheme winning the Australian Privacy Foundation's People's Choice award, for unwarranted privacy intrusion, in 2004.

[admin]

Cross post from latest news (whole article is here.

"We need a system that manages rumour surveillance, influenza-like illness data, population data, geographic mapping, anti-viral usage, adverse events data and staffing capacity to ensure an effective and efficient response," an interim report says.

"Staff found NetEpi difficult to use, data entry was problematic, and analysis and reporting functionalities could not be utilised."

NetEpi is open source web-based software designed to help public health authorities investigate and manage outbreaks of communicable disease as well as other chronic illnesses.

[admin]

IDM, April 23, 2009:

St Vincents & Mercy Private Hospital Limited, a Melbourne-based private hospital group, has agreed on an $A590,000 contract with iSOFT for its Integra suite of web-enabled finance and purchasing applications, plus a range of additional modules including document imaging, self-service requisitioning, and business intelligence.

Intended to improve financial management and control and reduce the time and costs of processing orders, the contract is for an end-to-end financial management and purchasing solution. Integra is also being integrated with an existing iSOFT web-based hospital information system to manage purchasing and billing of items, such as prosthetics. The contract includes ongoing maintenance support.


This is iSOFT’s second order for Integra in Australia, and follows a detailed evaluation of international financial management solutions and established local suppliers by St Vincents & Mercy Private.

Brenton Button, Chief Financial Officer at St Vincents & Mercy Private, said: “Integra is a cost-effective solution from a proven supplier that understands the needs of healthcare providers. It is a highly flexible solution to suit our needs by reflecting our management structure, workflows and working practices.

“Ready access to reliable information allows us to pro-actively manage finances and control this vital business function,” Button said. “Streamlining and automating the purchasing process will reduce paperwork, data entry, delays and cut purchasing costs.”

Developed by iSOFT Business Solutions, Integra is used by over 100 National Health Service hospitals in the UK and 40 local government authorities including several large police and emergency service authorities.

St Vincents & Mercy Private has been an iSOFT client since the merger of St Vincent’s Private Hospital and Mercy Private Hospital in 1998. Mercy Private had been a client since 1990.

The first sale of Integra was at Macquarie University Private Hospital in October 2008, under the $7.6 million contract for a range of healthcare applications at the new hospital, including LORENZO Acute Care.

[admin]

Grab for patient records

The Australian | Karen Dearne | May 19, 2009

MEDICAL market research firm AsteRx plans a grab for doctors' prescribing records with an offer of powerful business intelligence software free to GPs who sign up.

AsteRx managing director Jon Marshall says de-identified patient data provides valuable insight into healthcare trends -- including the spread of infectious diseases -- for which drug companies, pharmacists and others are prepared to pay.

"We essentially want to build a large network of GPs so that we can provide data that can be called on in times of need," he said. "If we were extracting data from every GP in Australia, we would be able to track the swine flu, for instance.

"From the data we already collect I can tell you whether there has been an increase in immunisations, or increased incidences of flu, right up to yesterday's figures."

In return, doctors would benefit from clinical and business insights into their own systems and activities that the software would give them.

The business intelligence application -- accessed through a dashboard -- is based on Inside Info's QlikView product and designed so users can quickly query information and create reports.

"Basically, we have built a platform that allows us to gather data from any GP software package, and run it through a layer to create common data elements that we then aggregate up," he said. "From there, you can put QlikView over the top and begin to perform the analytics, data mining and reporting."

Mr Marshall said the business involved collecting millions of lines of data from individual doctors, but until now it had been difficult to access data already in clinical and practice software.

"With QlikView, we're starting to build some really neat reports," he said.

The dashboard approach means doctors can query things like the number of patients on an asthma care plan in their practice, or identify which diabetic patients are overdue for a review.

The platform was originally built to help AsteRx's buyers of data sourced from some 330-340 GPs who provide their prescription records in return for small "incentive" payments.

Payment of doctors for patient information caused a controversy in 2004, when consumer groups discovered pharmaceutical market researcher CAMM Pacific was extracting data directly from the Medical Director software used by participating GPs.

A complaint to the federal privacy commissioner was subsequently dismissed on the grounds that the patient information had been "de-identified" and neither patient nor doctor could be recognised.

Mr Marshall said the extraction and handling of de-identified data was now better understood, and he hoped for a more rational debate on privacy concerns.

Juanita Fernando, chair of the Australian Privacy Foundation's health committee, said the practice was unethical but legal.

"It's a really difficult issue for us," she said.

Patients often raised concerns about possible misuse of such sensitive information. "Because it doesn't contravene the law, there's not a lot we can do," Dr Fernando said. "All that's required is for the third party to take reasonable steps to de-identify data -- what are reasonable steps, anyway?

"I think there's a clear need to regulate these kinds of commercial interventions, along with greater protection for consumer health privacy, including individual consent for use of data by other parties," she said.

"There are also issues over what larger GP practices and super-clinics are doing, both with patient records and the privacy and rights of the doctors they employ."

According to analyst Frost and Sullivan, the global market for pharmaceutical data was worth almost $US1.2 billion in 2007, and it was growing at 1.55 per cent annually.

One of the largest players is Cegedim Dendrite, which holds more than 30 per cent of the drug customer relationship management market worldwide. In Australia, its health research arm, Cegedim Strategic Data, is one of AsteRx's leading customers.

After the dust-up in 2004-05, CAMM Pacific, a CSD subsidiary, was renamed Cegedim Strategic Data Australia. The company now holds an extensive database of longitudinal patient records.

Last month, CSD became the first company to provide such longitudinal patient data in the top five European nations, including Britain and Germany.

[admin]

Received this notice by email today. Very expensive but maybe worth it if you are about to make a big strategic decision.

I haven't read any research from this firm so I can't recommend it. Perhaps someone else knows more?

I enclose details of our guide to Business Intelligence Technologies, Tools & Services in Healthcare Industries.

Healthcare organizations in the U.S. are suffering financial strain. In the case of healthcare providers, such as hospitals, those financial pressures are particularly severe. While the current economic crisis has certainly made things worse for healthcare providers, the problems that beset them have been in the making for several years. Declining admissions, rising costs for medical supplies and services, and less generous reimbursements from the insurance industry. Payer-side health insurance companies, are also feeling the pinch of rising costs and lower employer contributions.

The health care industry has never been as technically advanced nor as financially troubled as it is today. The diagnosis and treatment options available to patients are the most sophisticated in the world. New therapies and life saving pharmaceuticals are coming onto the market every year. But partly because of this advancement, health care costs now consume nearly 16 percent of the U.S. GDP, and hospitals and other healthcare providers suffer the constant financial strain of providing treatments that are often not paid for or paid for only in part. In fact, one-third of the nation's 5,000 hospitals are operating at a loss while another third are just breaking even--Symptomatic of a very ill industry.

The insurance industry likewise has its troubles, albeit not as dire. Payers must grapple with how to fairly compensate providers for high-cost treatments, while weeding out those claims that are inflated or are outright fraudulent. Nearly a quarter of insurance claims are fraudulent, by one estimate, while another puts it at seven percent. Yet insurance companies as a group do not have a consistent policy for dealing with suspected fraud and many insurers bother to prosecute only the most egregious cases.

Business intelligence could help address these serious problems that undermine the financial health of both the provider and payer sides of the healthcare industry-and most large healthcare organizations already recognize this. Major companies, both on the provider [hospitals/clinics/physician] and the payer [insurance] side, have been adopting business intelligence platforms, tools and/or using information management services for several years, starting with data warehouse projects. One of the largest examples of this is Blue Cross Blue Shield Association's Blue Health Intelligence database, started in 2006. Comprised of 80 million "de-identified3" or blinded patient histories, this data mart will eventually be used to analyze critical clinical practices and their outcomes, costs vs. success, and other healthcare trends that BCBS intends to use to create benchmarks for clinical practices.

In virtually all large healthcare organization today there is one or more data warehouse project either completed or underway. In some instances, the problem is there are multiple data warehouses and these need to be integrated or consolidated for BI purposes. .

Mid-sized and small healthcare organizations are less likely to have large data warehouses, but may have other types of data consolidation and the implementation of simple BI tools for financial planning and reporting.

All of these data warehouses, data marts and databases in healthcare organizations contain a vast store of clinical, operational and insurance data, including patient histories, supply inventories, vendor invoices, admissions data and unstructured information such as patient verbatims, radiology images and scanned documents.

But for many healthcare provider and payer organizations, this store of data has not been transformed into useful information. It has not produced answers to questions about costs, revenues, trends, treatment outcomes, or correlations that would enhance profitability or quantity of patient care.

For more information please click on:
http://www.researchandmarkets.com/pr...logies_tools_s

Title Index:

Executive Summary
- BI Diagnostics for Healthcare's Pain
- Challenges & Barriers to BI Adoption

Chapter One Challenges for Payers & Providers
- Hard Times in Healthcare
-- Efficiency: A Major Concern
-- The Move Toward Evidence-based Medicine
-- Need for Information Transparency and Portability

Chapter Two Vendor Landscape: Boutique Firms & Market Leaders
- BI Services Firms: Market Leaders Target Healthcare
-- HIPAA and BI
-- Impact of Costs
- BI Technology Vendors: A Tool for Every Healthcare Need
- Current Vendor Landscape: Big Players in BI Services and Software

Chapter Three: Building the Business Case
- Healthcare BI Projects in Action
-- Case Study: Managed Care Plan Monitors Performance via Reporting & Scorecards
-- Case Study: Insurance Company Reduces Fraud with Analytics
-- Case Study: Hospital IS Provides Self-Service Analysis

Chapter Four: Conclusion: The Prognosis for Healthcare
- Future Prognosis: Need is Great, Investments are Limited

About the Authors

Appendix A: Research Methodology

Pricing:

Electronic (Single User) : EUR 14398

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