The Digital Health Festival was the hottest ticket in town. My feet still hurt.
Have you ever been in a crowd where you felt like you had no control about where you were going?
That was the experience of this correspondent at last week’s Digital Health Festival. And it was, in general, a very good thing.
The DHF was massive, and without knowing how many people turned up – the website will tell you it was over 8000 each day – there were a gazillion exhibitors, 11 theatres running concurrently, with a new session every half hour.
It wasn’t a conference so there were no breaks and the food wasn’t free – my only complaint, frankly. Two chicken wraps and a bucket of chips for $53? Come on.
It’s quite possible that I got more exercise in two days than in the previous two months, but I’m not complaining. There were stories everywhere I turned.
Whoever runs the next digital health event – and that may well be the AIDH’s HIC25 conference in August – has a new benchmark to aim at.
Of course, a lot of it was rose-coloured glasses kind of stuff. There were a few speeches that were probably ripped from the annual reports of whichever agency was doing the talking.
But ultimately, that wasn’t the point.
Everybody was there. Everybody. Government digital health branches, start-ups, software vendors, policymakers, aged care, disability, medical devices, hospitals, primary care, states and territories, international luminaries, and hundreds of wonks and nerds.
There were conversations happening on every square metre of the biggest exhibition space at Jeff’s Shed – the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre.
I’m pretty sure my publisher, Jeremy Knibbs, drank enough coffee to scare his cardiologist for a year, and did more talking than the United Nations.
There were a lot of buzzwords doing the rounds – if I never hear “north star” again, I’ll be quite happy.
The one that really caught my ear was “learning healthcare system”.
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If we can connect the system properly then there is every chance that it will become a living, breathing, improving entity that uses data in near real-time to become better and better as it continues to deliver care.
Awesome, if possible, and the beauty of events like DHF and HIC25, is they make it seem possible.
Bettina McMahon, CEO of Healthdirect had some interesting things to say on this during a webinar hosted by HSD this week about Health Connect Australia, the national health information exchange.
“The key to getting things done and getting reform through in health, is respecting the fact that we’re in a health system that needs to operate today at scale with high levels of quality and accessibility,” she said.
“That’s the baseline, and that can consume 110% of your resources and bandwidth and headspace, if you let it.
“It’s not like we’re building this thing from scratch to launch at some point – it’s operating today in anger.
“So any sort of reform initiatives, whether it’s an HIE, whether it’s new models of care, has to happen in the context of all the challenges that health system administrators are running into at the moment,” said Ms McMahon.
A two-speed strategic plan was key, she said.
“Speed one is operating excellent services, high levels of quality, delivering value for money. You’ve just got to do that and get that done.
“And then we have the second speed, which is thinking about a more ambitious future … of how we can add more value through supporting the health system to be optimised better, to improving access into vulnerable communities, whether it’s around language or educational level or knowledge of the health system or other sorts of things.
“How do we walk and chew gum at the same time?”
“That’s a feature of everyone trying to get things done in a health system. The big question is, how can you do both?
“Because if you just go reform, then you ignore the basics … and then you get dragged back down.
“And if you just do the operations, then you skip the opportunity for reform.”
It’s a question of trying to keep both balls in the air, said Ms McMahon.
“Be laser focused on that excellent delivery of service, whether it’s in a hospital environment or virtual across for the digital health agency, or My Health Record and other services, while thinking about what the 10-year plan is.”
A living, breathing, learning healthcare system, indeed.