Walking the Streets of Brisbane

I went to the AIDH Summit in Brisbane last week and wanted to introduce you to some of the people I spent time with. Kara came to us from Queensland Health and connected me with some Queensland people. Kara has an incredible gift of starting and maintaining good discussions--I often find myself a bit socially awkward and not great at making conversations smooth (Brian will attest to that), so it was great to have Kara at my side!

• Clair Sullivan - of course, many of us know Clair, but she was the lead figure at the Summit. She is an exemplar of bringing research to improve practice, and I hope to continue learning from her processes and successes. She is also a very effective communicator. Here are a few gems from her talks:

  • Avoiding opportunities just to avoid failure is perhaps the riskiest position of all in the digital economy

  • Leaders need to be comfortable with being uncomfortable in order to be effective

  • The best leaders have a contagious positive energy

She and her team have been doing a lot of systematic and scoping reviews that we can learn from (what reviews should we be doing in the Centre?):

• Toward a Learning Health Care System: A Systematic Review and Evidence-Based Conceptual Framework for Implementation of Clinical Analytics in a Digital Hospital

• Economic evaluation and analyses of hospital-based electronic medical records (EMRs): a scoping review of international literature

• Synthesizing Dimensions of Digital Maturity in Hospitals: Systematic Review

• David Bunker, Director of Health Translation Queensland (corollary to our MACH) - David is a strategic thinker with a personal investment in a connected health system, because he has a child with severe disabilities. He started his new role looking at the data to confirm what people had suspected: Queensland receives less medical research grant funding than would be expected. Two reasons are: not very many clinician scientists and too much competition/not enough collaboration around Queensland. Something for us to keep an eye on.

• Vicki Bennett leads Metadata, Information Management & Classifications at AIHW. Kathleen introduced us when I first moved here, and I had a great time talking with her at the CSIRO offices and at the Summit. She blew my mind with a piece of information many of you probably already know: GPs do not get paid by the government. Patients receive payment for their visit and can use that payment for the GP visit. This has ramifications in terms of government incentives (or lack of them) for getting GPs to provide data for quality metrics or research.

It seems as if I’m trying to hit many Australian cities in the same week--I’m in Canberra right now but for personal reasons rather than work, supporting my ANU student son through a tough time. I appreciate the attitude Australians seem to have about allowing people personal leave without judgment. That is sometimes a contrast to what I saw in the US.

Regional Linguistic Quirks (RLQ): Kara also introduced me to Mchael Schuietz from Queensland University of Technology, and he described the funding of digital health in Australia as similar to a bunch of people running around individually in the outback without any destination goal. He said they are all looking for a billabong. I know that word from the surf clothing and learned a billabong is an isolated pond left behind after a river changes course. The next day I saw that term used in a delightful article about cycling changing the culture in a small NT town.