We had an internal Advisory Board meeting last week and got excellent engagement of the board members. We described our efforts to grow capacity in our region and across Australia, including our education and workforce training and new hiring that will occur over the next few months. A key part of that capacity building is partnering, and we are creating some important and exciting partnerships I wanted to update you on.
ANDHealth - ANDHealth provides commercialisation support programs for Australian digital health companies. They share our view of the gaps that exist in the pathway to digital health intervention adoption, and our focus on integration in the healthcare system is something they explicitly do not work on - so there is great opportunity for them to send companies to us when their intervention involves the healthcare system. In addition to the incubator program they offer, they are providing masterclasses and innovation/ideation workshops that we could build on.
HL7 Australia and CSIRO AEHRC -Kayley Lyons has been leading a needs analysis of the market and a follow-up proposal to ADHA to develop and deliver FHIR training in Australia. We are partners on this proposal but are the lead architects of it, and Kayley (with support from Mady Mani, Meredith Layton, Kate Ebrill, and Isobel Frean) has created a compelling and exciting proposal. Health Level Seven® International (HL7®) is the global authority on standards for interoperability of health technology, and HL7 Australia exists to facilitate adoption of e-health in Australia by promoting effective use of standards. Many of you are familiar with the CSIRO Australian e-Health Research Centre who specialize in data and interoperability, precision health, the Internet of Things, etc. Being the FHIR trainers in Australia would be a coveted opportunity to grow greatly needed capacity and to use the Validitron Sandbox for education.
The debate on AI in healthcare went well - it was a really fun way to discuss the pros and cons of an issue in front of an audience. With a 2-1 vote of the adjudicators, our side provided a more persuasive argument that the risks DO NOT outweigh the benefits. We did have an advantage to be able to argue for AI rather than agains it, but our opponents had some excellent points and especially fantastic rhetorical style by Shaanan Cohney. Robert and my speech outlines are here if you are interested.
We used the 4th of July as an excuse to have friends over yesterday and have an American BBQ: bratwurst, beef brisket, potato salad, corn on the cob, and watermelon - a stereotypical American backyard celebration! In lieu of pictures this week, I’ll share my recipe for potato salad and two versions of our favorite song (by Dave Alvin) mentioning the 4th of July:
Sung by Dave Alvin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6N57snnJrA
Sung by X (he replaced the original Billy Zoom as a guitarist with X): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_tyWt_9Bfs
Regional Linguistic Quirks (RLQ): With Wimbledon on, I thought of the phrase “aced” as in “We aced our debate!” Originally, the verb ace was a way to say that someone had scored a point in a sport like tennis or golf. In the 1900s, this expression became popular slang, as a way to describe a student’s high grades. From there, people began using this expression to describe anything that a person did very well.
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