Australian Technology News

TINY magnetic discs just a millionth of a metre in diameter could be used to kill cancer cells, according to a study.

JUST as Apple's App Store revolutionised the mobile phone industry, widgets are coming soon to a TV screen near you.

APPLE won't honour warranties on smoker's broken machines, claiming the tar buildup is a health hazard for technicians.

A national telephone warning system to alert people to a bushfire emergency will begin operating next week.

The system can send thousands of text and voice messages a minute to residents in the fire's path. But holidaymakers at risk from fires will not be warned this summer because the system cannot yet zero in on mobile phones taken into danger zones.

The final testing of the system, known as the Emergency Alert, took place in the Victorian coastal town of Torquay today. The national system launch will coincide with the start of summer next week.

It aims to overcome some of the communication blunders that contributed to the Black Saturday disaster last February in which 173 people died. "This is a system that will save lives, there's no doubt about that," Victorian Premier John Brumby said.

"It is a system that will get a message out to people quickly and efficiently in life-threatening situations."

Currently, the system can issue warnings only to landline and mobile phones based on billing addresses within an identified area. Authorities are working frantically on technology that can contact all mobile phones in areas under threat, so that visitors can also be warned.

Emergency Services Commissioner Bruce Esplin said he hoped the second stage of the project would be ready in the new year, but there was still a lot of work to do.

"I'm very comfortable that something exists, and we need to now work through and make sure it will work; we are insistent in making sure that this system will work in the way we want it to on the days we need it most."

The warning system, operated by Telstra, will only be used in life-threatening situations at the command of a bushfire incident controller. It is also available for other major emergencies, including floods, storms and chemical spills and can send 300 text messages a second and 1000 voice messages a minute.

"It's a system that won't be overused. It must not become something that people become blase about. When people get those messages, it's a cause for action," Esplin said. He also warned that receiving an alert message was not a trigger to ring triple-zero, stressing the need to keep emergency lines open.

During the public trial more than 50,000 text and voice messages were issued to landlines and mobile phones in four regional and metropolitan centres in Victoria.

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A professor at the University of Sydney who wrote a scathing essay about NSW Health's implementation of a Cerner system within emergency departments has accused the government of pressuring his institution to take the essay down, which it did, if only temporarily.

One would have thought that Cerner was aware of the failure of the contract to specify the necessary reporting module and so it appears to be a form of gazumping.

Professor Jon Patrick

"Version 4 of this essay was temporarily withdrawn on Friday, 23rd October by the university following a complaint from NSW Health," Professor Jon Patrick said on the Health Information Technologies Research Laboratory website. He believed the university was correct to investigate the complaint and didn't consider it at the time as an act of censorship.

NSW Health had not responded to ZDNet.com.au's requests for comment at the time of writing and Cerner declined to comment.

Patrick's belief in that investigation seemed shaken two weeks later though. "It is now two weeks since the original essay was withdrawn. In that time I have been able to establish confidently that NSW Health phoned my head of Department and asked him to remove the article without giving a specific complaint," Patrick said on the website.

The head of department refused; however, a person from another faculty "took up the cause" and was able to persuade someone in power to order the withdrawal of the essay, according to Patrick.

"To this time I have not received a specific complaint let alone a written complaint. The university's Office of General Counsel has studied the essay at my request through my Dean, and found that it is 'consistent with the university's Public Comment Policy'. I am awaiting further investigations by the university."

Yesterday the issue was resolved. "The university has affirmed my right to publish my critical essay, and the attempt to censor me has been mitigated," Patrick wrote. The essay was republished in a new longer version, with no removed content.

The department is partway through a three-year strategy to implement standard electronic medical records across all of the state's 220 hospitals using software from US e-health specialist Cerner. This is to be completed by June 2010. The emergency department system, FirstNet, is one of the core components to be rolled out to all hospitals. It has already been implemented in many of them.

But it has not been well received, Patrick's essay claimed, with some hospitals even rolling back implementations, fearing the system's impact on patient safety. "The need for a systemic study became clear during work that was being undertaken at a number of NSW hospitals when clinicians and administrators constantly expressed their dissatisfaction, even hostility, to FirstNet, to the point of often refusing to use it," Patrick's essay said in its opening paragraphs.

He pointed to a recent study carried out by Professor Johanna Westbrook, at the University of Sydney, where 13 physicians and seven nurses were interviewed. The study found that although the sharing of patient information between systems was positive, the FirstNet interface "considerably" increased the administrative workload of clinicians, the study claimed. Another study carried out in 2005 at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Centre said that after clinicians started entering instructions for patient care electronically using Cerner, there was a statistically significant increase in mortality from 2.8 per cent to 6.57 per cent.

Patrick believed the problem became clearer, however, when talking to knowledgeable professionals in different locations and operating environments. He pulled together the opinions of many clinicians who had experience in clinical information systems.

FirstNet had made a positive impact in that it allowed service and workflow tracking. It also allowed doctors to quickly receive discharge summaries from hospitals. Yet Patrick considered these benefits to be secondary gain, quoting one professional who said that being glad about such positives was like being happy about a house burning down because you could roast potatoes on the fridges.

Another clinician who had IT training said that FirstNet required 30 per cent more time to complete data entry of patient information than his current system, according to Patrick's report. One hospital created a graph which said that there had been a 50 per cent decrease in the number of patients seen by a doctor in the first 20 minutes of their arrival at the emergency department. In more than one hospital, staff had reverted to paper-based data entry because FirstNet was seen as too cumbersome in comparison to prior systems. The system was considered to be slow, partially due to the network and hardware it was running on.

While the systems weren't working, IT wasn't responding to staff concerns, according to Patrick's essay. The abridged comments of one rural NSW physician were quoted:

Nurses presented a long document detailing multiple concerns. The meeting was quite emotional and heated as they tried over and over again to pull the wool over our eyes. For example, they started out offering 'more support'. One clinician replied that this was like giving us a defective car then sending out someone to show us how to drive it. I asked was the support available at 3am? Blank faces. They dissimulated info that 'other doctors' in small country hospitals were trialling the system and had 'no problems'. When asked which hospitals and which doctors again blank faces. They finally came up with a name who one of our partners rang that night and found him to be furious his name was used and that they were about to dump the system too.

In another incident IT management refused to create an issues register for problems, according to the essay.

Some have controversially claimed Cerner's technology was not up to scratch in general, according to Patrick. The academic pointed to statements by Richard Granger, the former director of UK's Connecting for Health national clinical IT program, responsible for the roll-out of all technology for the UK's National Health Service. He was quoted as saying that "some of the stuff that Cerner has put in recently is appalling".

Yet, when it came to making changes, Patrick claimed the company wasn't keen to respond to requests from users in its small Australian user group.

He was also less than enamoured with what he believed were contractual conditions between Cerner and the NSW Government. He said staff had been told that their difficulty with getting certain reports using the system was that software modules needed to generate some reports weren't included in the original contract with Cerner, which meant further costs would be incurred to get those modules.

Patrick claimed that the module's non-inclusion in the contract was deliberate by Cerner. "One would have thought that Cerner was aware of the failure of the contract to specify the necessary reporting module and so it appears to be a form of gazumping, that is, effectively raising the price of the sale after final offers have been accepted," he said. He was also concerned that NSW Health might have signed a contract that included a "held harmless clause" — where the vendor is free from recriminations on system faults or their consequences, and the contractee is stopped from expressing the deficiencies of the software in public.

The choice of Cerner had been almost automatic, he claimed, after Australian rival iSoft didn't cover the scope of the tender and since alternate rival Epic wasn't marketed in Australia. A second round of tenders was called but no alternative was found.

Patrick said in his essay that open source could be the answer to vendor lock-in, an opinion he has previously expressed in the media, and that in the long term, the government should be spending money on research and development of clinical systems for Australia. He believed that it wasn't possible to know all requirements in advance of making software because of the variety of users with autonomous behaviour which all have a limited view of how others operate.

He thought the system should be flexible in its interface so that hospitals could make it optimal for their needs. "The era of rigidly designed user interfaces that do not allow any variation for user preferences or a capacity to model the user's needs is long gone," he said. Cerner had not seemed to keep up with this trend, he said.

NSW Health was offered the opportunity to provide comments to an early version of the essay but declined the offer, according to Patrick. The positives and negatives of the Cerner system was also discussed in the Garling report.

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Ashley Towns, the Australian behind the ikee iPhone worm that replaced the background picture of insecure jailbroken iPhones, has reportedly been hired by Sydney company mogeneration.

The BBC reports a spokesperson for mogeneration said, "We interviewed Ashley, assessed him with our iPhone developer test — which he passed with flying colours — and we employed him today."

Mogeneration counts News Digital Media, Coastalwatch and GetPrice among its clients.

The news has drawn fire from Sophos security consultant Graham Cluley, who wrote in his blog: "it jars with me that Towns has shown no regret for what he did, and that now his utterly irresponsible behaviour appears to have been rewarded."

"There are plenty of young coders out there who would not have acted so stupidly, are just as worthy of an opportunity inside a software development company, and are actually quite likely to be better coders than Towns who made a series of blunders with his code."

Towns rose to prominence when the ikee worm hit jailbroken iPhones earlier this month. The worm spread via users failing to change the default SSH root password. A botnet was subsequently added to the worm.

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FORGET the Transformers and Astroboy: Japan's latest robots don't save the world - they cook snacks and play with your kids.

The Federal Government will ignore a coalition-dominated Senate committee's call for a cost-benefit analysis into the National Broadband Network (NBN).

Of the 12 recommendations made by the committee, the Rudd government has agreed with just one, which advocates the development of new applications that promote economic development and improvements in health, education and energy efficiency.

The NBN has a price tag of $43 billion and has been touted by the government as the largest infrastructure project ever undertaken in Australia.

The committee, in its third report into project, recommended a rigorous cost-benefit analysis be done before the NBN Co enters into any new asset purchasing agreements for the mainland deployment.

But despite the cost, the government is continuing to refuse to conduct such an analysis. It has also refused to agree to the committee's recommendation that an interim report of an implementation study due early next year be provided by December 31.

The government also rejected a recommendation that further consideration of the NBN legislation not proceed until there is certainty about the regulatory framework that will surround the NBN.

Liberal senator and committee chair Mary Jo Fisher said the cost-benefit analysis should be done in the interest of transparency.

"Rural and regional Australia are still grappling with working out what they'll get, when they'll get it, how they'll get it," she told the Senate on Thursday. "It seems that with the greater of the spend come less transparency."

But a spokesman for Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said the opposition was simply attempting to delay the rollout of the network, while also failing to produce a communications policy of its own.

"The government is getting on with the job of rolling out this vital productive infrastructure platform," he told AAP. "Nick Minchin and the Liberal Party have no communications policy and no contribution to make on broadband."

Construction work was already underway in Tasmania and the implementation study on the national rollout of the NBN would be completed in early 2010, he said.

Greens communications spokesman Scott Ludlam said it was regrettable the legislation that will deliver the regulatory reforms would not be debated this year.

The government had hoped to have the debate take place this week but it has been forced off the agenda by the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.

Senator Ludlam was also critical of government plans to sell down its 51 per cent controlling interest in the company that will build and operate the NBN within five years after it's built.

The build is expected to take eight years.

"Nowhere have we seen any justification for this incongruous and retrograde policy which seems determined to repeat the mistakes of the past," Senator Ludlam said.

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Shadow Communications Minister Nick Minchin has resigned from the shadow ministry to protest the opposition's stance on the carbon pollution reduction scheme (CPRS).

He said that he and Shadow Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs Tony Abbott had gone to see Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull in his office to try and convince him to change his mind about supporting the passage of the government's legislation on the carbon scheme.

Minchin proposed that the legislation be referred to a Senate Committee for inquiry and that it be discussed further after the Copenhagen climate change conference in December.

"Mr Turnbull declined this proposition, so I advised that I would have no alternative but to resign from the shadow cabinet as I was not able to support the CPRS legislation," Minchin said in a statement.

The resignation takes effect when parliament finishes for the year next week. Turnbull said he would assess the necessary reshuffle at that time.

Minchin said he would remain as senate leader until the resumption of Senate sittings in February when, as a backbencher, he would step down.

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EMAILS and tweets posted by federal politicians in Parliament aren't protected by parliamentary privilege, the Speaker warns.