Coproducing translational digital health research

I had a really good trip to Canberra. I met with Victor in the botanical gardens--he lives in Canberra and is a contractor/advisor for the Centre. I met Victor pitching the idea of the Digital Health Validitron while he was the CEO of the Digital Health CRC. After leaving the CRC, he reached out to me, because the idea of the Validitron really resonated with him. As part of the Validitron and Collective Impact Incubator teams, he has been instrumental in helping us take the Validitron from an idea to reality by refining our message (particularly to industry) and connecting us with important partners. He gives me more confidence when talking with industry and will hopefully play a larger role as we become ready for more industry partnerships. You will also find Victor gracious and kind.

Within Without by James Turrell, in the gardens of the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra

Meredith, Kara, and I met with the RIC Business Development Team and described how we are trying to facilitate digital transformation of health in our ecosystem by applying learning health system principles in partnership with health services. We are just getting started, and to help guide us in future directions, I turned to our brian trust: all of you! We had a good discussion Friday about co-producing translational digital health / informatics research, and this discussion will continue because it’s the holy grail we seek. There were some great comments - this was my favorite:

What we get is random care--what we need is randomised care we can learn from

What do health services want from research?	What do health services need from research?	What are some models and mechanisms for achieving this partnership?
Improve business processes/workflows/capacity Data-driven practice improvement and optimisation Improvement in outcomes and cost-effectiveness of everyday patient care	To know what’s already been done Evidence to inform decision making, identification of areas for improvement, and a better understanding of their population’s needs Frameworks and robust methods Understanding of their own performance Evidence that research active hospitals provide better quality of care	Ongoing partnership with clinical embedding in the university and researcher embedding in the health service Grass roots, organic collaboration development High-level agreements to ease collaborations

Here are a few exemplars I think will be really important for us to adapt to our environment:

• Bimodal IT, as described by Gartner where you marry a more predictable evolution of products and technologies (Mode 1) with the new and innovative (Mode 2)

• The ReimagineEHR initiative: The University of Utah Department of Biomedical Informatics and its partners have over 50 years of history exploring the underlying science of designing and implementing clinical decision support solutions that provide cognitive support for clinicians at the point of care across several health delivery systems. Look here for details about how they are doing this with SMART on FHIR apps.

• Better Together describes how academics and hospital IT must work closely: “Common among these successes in informatics ‘translation’ were institutions that had both academic biomedical informatics units and operational health information technology units that exhibited pre-existing pathways for communication and collaboration, and in many cases, had shared leadership positions that spanned such units.”

Regional Linguistic Quirks (RLQ): An Australian term I’ve heard a lot here but never before is “cluey”, to be wise, knowledgeable, or aware. I’m guessing it was created as an adjective from the word “clue” as in “she is clued in”. I hope someone says that about me someday!