I switched from my blog to Slack in hopes we could have more frequent and interactive communications. But I declare it a failure. Please feel free to leave comments on the blog ;)
It has been a very eventful few weeks of evolving partnerships and evolving opportunities. This post is a bit long—and perhaps boring—but it’s indicative of the progress we are making as a Centre by being considered as potential partners in what is proving to be a very exciting and pivotal time in Australia for digital health!
CDTH had a strong showing at Medinfo in Sydney with panels, workshops, scientific talks, keynotes, posters, and a booth with a lot of traffic. We saw many health system friends there, met up with groups from around Australia, and saw many international colleagues.
We brought eleven international visitors home to Melbourne with us and learned a lot from them:
Ang Davis, University of Manchester
Fran Dooley, University of Manchester
Genevieve Melton-Meaux, University of Minnesota
Peter Embi, Vanderbilt University
Danielle Mowery, University of Pennsylvania
Philip Payne, Washington University
Jorie Butler, Salt Lake City Veteran’s Administration Health Care System
Polina Kukhareva, University of Utah
Jaya Chaturvedi, Kings College London
Alec Chapman, University of Utah (yes he is my son )
Jennifer Boehne, CareLoop
Catherine Craven, University of Texas Health San Antonio
Thankam Thyvalikakath, University of Indiana
We hosted two activities:
- A Forum on Leadership and Governance that foster digital health innovation – 85 participants including four international visitors, representatives from 8 health services and government staff (even Mike Roberts, CEO of Safer Care Victoria). More to come on this, because we will be generating a report with recommendations based on our findings from the forum and follow-up activities
- A networking event with lightning talks and panel discussions about AI, Clinical Informatics, and Education.
Daniel and I accompanied the Victorian Department of Health on tours of Queensland and Western Australia to learn about their digital command centres. We had some good discussions with representatives from Royal Melbourne Hospital and Ambulance Victoria about what our partnership with them on the Victorian Digital Command might look like.
I returned to Sydney to speak at the Healthcare Leaders Forum and was on a panel with Amanda Cattermole (CEO of ADHA) and Lance Emerson (CEO of VAHI). I like Amanda’s vision for My Health Record (MHR) and we talked on the panel about how MHR can empower patients through control of their data. Lance emphasized the need to align politics and policy with the social and technical changes, because the politics can stop progress. Amanda and some of her team will be visiting the Validitron SimLab on the 11th.
I also visited Tom Snelling and Grace Currie at the University of Sydney to learn more about the Learning Health Unit they have set up in the children’s hospital. I think it can be a good model for the LHS Innovation Hubs we have been thinking about. The LH Unit is embedded in the hospital, and they are developing an innovation pipeline with data extraction, wrangling and analysis in the Gen Med department focused on the first project of better managing respiratory infections. They will develop an intervention based on the data-driven insight, implement it, and track outcomes to continue learning.
Almost there – the last visit was with Daniel McCabe, the First Assistant Secretary for Medicare. Victor, Kit, and I talked about opportunities for the Validitron to be used as a testbed for upcoming digital solutions. Daniel McCabe was very open about his vision for digital enablement of better connected healthcare for patients. We hope to continue the discussion and be part of the solution by de-risking new interventions and innovations.
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