A small psychology practice approached Combase seeking guidance around privacy, cyber security, and professional obligations relating to client information.
The practice relied on a combination of cloud systems for bookings, telehealth, email, note storage, and administration, but wanted a clearer understanding of potential risks and whether reasonable safeguards were in place.
Combase conducted a practical review covering account security, staff access, backups, third-party providers, AI-assisted tools, and handling of sensitive health information. Particular attention was given to privacy obligations, operational risk, and the practical realities of a small clinical environment.
The outcome was a clear, prioritised set of recommendations focused on achievable improvements appropriate to the size and nature of the practice, helping the organisation feel more confident in its systems and processes.
The IMIA project was a national program run by three agencies, the Bureau of Meteorology, Geoscience Australia and CSIRO. Combase engineers were recruited to build the data platform and the data pipelines which were all hosted on AWS.
The work involved collecting data from a variety of sources, normalizing the data and using geospatial techniques to cut the data and turn them into 1km square grids. This platform was then populated with hydrological modelling data developed by the scientists. The scientists were then able to query the data using geospatial tools.
This is a $35M Federal Government program designed to research a number of regions throughout Australia to examine potential impact of the exploitation of tight gas and shale gas reserves. Combase was recruited to build and manage the Data Management Platform for the program.
This meant building a cloud-based data repository together with various pipelines to move data from the platform to public catalogues on the release of reports.
The system also automated the text-based reports, extracting images and tracking references in the data to ensure that licence conditions were adhered to and that the provenance of various data artefacts were preserved in metadata.
Sphere was a national depression project run by the University of New South Wales. The project involved gathering data from GP’s around the country in the form of questionnaires and sending the information to UNSW researchers who collated the information to support the research.
The Combase team built the data platform for the research and supplied technical expertise to support the effort
The Bureau of Meteorology were responsible for hosting the information platform for the Bioregional Assessments Program. This platform was designed to ensure that all of the science carried out in the program was transparent and that all the findings were supported with live and downloadable datasets.
The Bureau was also responsible for hosting the Bioregional Explorer, a web based geospatial analysis tool that allows members of the public to examine and explore potential scenarios predicted by scientists in the bioregions under scrutiny.
The data that supported the explorer needed to be scrubbed to remove sensitive information about for example threatened species. The data also needed to be standardised and in some cases simplified for use on a web application.
Lantern Psychology is a Canberra based psychology clinic that is looking to automate their psychological assessment process.
As their key concern is patient confidentiality, they have instructed Combase to ensure that patient data is stored separately from survey results and that only psychologists can have access to the names and personal details of their clients. Combase have adapted their Measure-App application to automate the launching of assessments and the collection of data.
The Murray Darling Basin Authority are in the process of upgrading their hydrological time series data management system.
They recruited Combase to provide advice about hosting data systems in the cloud. Combase analysed the systems in place and produced a comprehensive report specifying compute and storage resources required to achieve their objectives.
Combase was recruited by the Department of Defence to assist them to achieve ISO 16175 for one of their record keeping applications.
This was a year-long project that involved working with their records keeping professionals as well as an off-site development team and the National Archives of Australia to make sure that the records keeping features were correctly specified and implemented and that the correct metadata standards were implemented.
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