IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

Journet’s role in Austrade demands that Australian education and training is marketed and promoted internationally and it certainly helps the agency’s case when “Australia has become a leader in e-learning content and educational technology systems”.

Like most countries, walking into a doctors surgery can be a laborious process, with medical records being re-told over and over again before diagnosis can get under way. However, the Federal government has looked to amend this process by putting medical records online through an electronic health record system.

According to a new report from consults Ovum, Australia's national level eHelath strategy development has slowed to a crawl.

Federal Health Minister Peter Dutton has announced an independent review of the project to see how it can be improved.

AMA national president Dr Steve Hambleton, one of the panel members for the review, says e-health records need to be made easier for doctors to use.

Global advisory and accounting firm Ernst and Young has blasted the Australian government’s efforts to digitise its services to the community and business as “poor”, warning that “the nation’s ability to gain competitive advantage through innovative use of digital technology will quickly be eroded” unless a lack of political and financial commitment is reversed.

A new report — Digital Australia: State of the Nation — released on Monday by the firm report paints a dismal picture of government digitisation efforts to date, highlighting new findings that say that “almost a third of citizens nominated the public sector as providing their worst digital experience, putting it at the bottom of our national rankings.”

Key points:

• Estonia was one of the first countries to declare internet access to be a human right
• 99 per cent of government services are available online 24/7
• 50 new AI applications are set to go online within the public sector by 2020

Walking through the fairy-tale streets of Estonia's capital Tallinn, it may seem hard to believe that this tiny nation is home to one of the most advanced e-governance systems in the world.

At the beginning of ‘The Great Debate’, the audience was polled. 68 per cent of delegates thought that Australia’s e-government is better, versus 32 per cent who supported Europe.

Peter Reichstadter, Head of Digital Austria at Federal Chancellery and Graham Bell, CIO of City of London formed Team Europe.

To say that the project has its doubters and critics would be an understatement. The Medical Software Industry of Australia (MSIA), the Australian Medical Association (AMA) and the Consumers e-health Alliance are among the many groups that spoke to the senate committee about their concerns regarding the implementation of the PCEHR. Their complaints are varied and range from privacy, to governance and liability, through to doubts about whether anyone would actually use the system.

The Government will redesign australia.gov.au to serve as the single site for Australians to seek out government services, with an anticipated relaunch for the first quarter of 2009.

Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK, and US offer advice on potential smart city vulnerabilities and how to mitigate them.

New guidance, Cybersecurity Best Practices for Smart Cities, wants to raise awareness among communities and organizations implementing smart city technologies that these beneficial technologies can also have potential vulnerabilities. A collaboration among the Five Eye nations (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and the US), it advises communities considering becoming smart cities to assess and mitigate the cybersecurity risks that comes with the technology.

A joint effort between the U.S., U.K., Australia, Canada and New Zealand yielded recommendations to prevent cyber attacks on increasingly digital infrastructure.

As municipal infrastructure becomes increasingly integrated with technologies to improve the operations and efficiency of basic utilities—running water, power, and internet access—the governments of the U.S., U.K., Australia, Canada and New Zealand launched updated cybersecurity protocols.

The concept of heavily connected, internet driven Smart Cities bristling with digital cameras and sensors might have been the dream of Big Tech firms like Google and Amazon looking to rewire urban infrastructure in their own image, but the Five Eyes intelligence community, including the Australian Signals Directorate, has just fired off a serious new warning about the major cyber risks technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT)  and 5G now pose.

In a major upgrade to advice previously directed at the deployment of 5G networks, the Five Eyes agencies are now telling everyone from major carriers to town mayors and wastewater operators to take a serious second look at the heavily-pumped notion of connecting everything from rubbish bins to traffic lights to the net.

The Australian Government has announced a grant of nearly 1.4 million AUD (around 1 million USD) for four Vietnamese high-tech application projects in the field of digital transformation, through the Aus4Innovation Programme.

The funding is made within the framework of the Innovation Partnership Grants under the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s Aus4Innovation Programme in cooperation with the Ministry of Science and Technology of Vietnam.

REGIONAL and rural health services could fall further behind big cities without urgent action, a new Australian Medical Association report warns.

The AMA released its Position Statement on Better Access to High Speed Broadband for Rural and Remote Health Care on Friday.

It calls on the Government to improve internet access and affordability across the nation.

While yesterday's game changing announcement has been largely welcomed by the communications and content industries, the revamped strategy will add at least another year to the eventual deployment of high speed broadband services in Australia. With the build time slated for eight years and another onerous vendor RFP to be issued the overall timeline has been pushed out by at least 12 months.

Let me make this clear: if we don’t smarten up, Australia’s single biggest competitive advantage post the mining boom – high speed, ubiquitous broadband – could soon be our single biggest threat.

As technological progress continues at relentless speed, Australia needs to get serious about leveraging the opportunities ubiquitous broadband offers before the rest of the world starts using our infrastructure to deliver their smart innovations directly to our market.

The computers which cost over GH¢41,000, have in-built activation mechanisms to withstand power interruption and also have high speed internet connection.

A $5 million telehealth project aims to enhance delivery of mental health care in South Australia. The project, announced today, is funded by the Commonwealth and the South Australian government under the $20 million digital regions initiative.

The mental health project includes more than 100 new videoconferencing units to upgrade call and image quality for more than 80 sites around the state, the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy said. The project aims to reduce patient travel time, enable online access to health services, connect patients with family members living far away and “deliver rount the clock emergency triage and liaison services,” the department said.

One of the painfully slow after-effects of the Black Saturday bushfires has been to rebuild all of the vital community information that was lost, including the medical records of all the patients at the Marysville Medical Clinic, now located in Buxton.