Fellows of the Institute

The year 2020 recognises that being digitally connected is now more important than ever. Being a Fellow of the Institute, provides me an opportunity to engage with other members and the institute to advocate that no person in Australia is left out, or left behind because of a lack of access to, or the ability to engage with digital technologies.

I have been working in digital health for over 18 years, starting with the first ever HealthConnect Trial down in Tasmania. Since that time, I have been a passionate advocate for the development and implementation of standards to enable the more efficient, seamless and effective use of clinical information. I look forward to supporting the Institute and its members work towards interoperable healthcare.

I have been a registered nurse for over 30 years, where I have enjoyed clinical, research and education roles. This journey led to completion of a PhD focussing on digital health. I look forward to remaining engaged in building digital health capability and capacity within the field and progressing the aims of the Institute.

Since my days at the Melbourne Uni, I submersed myself into the industry and did not have quite the time or opportunity to focus on the emerging trends and technologies in Health Informatics. The fellowship is an excellent professional opportunity for me to bring myself current on both. The institute also aspire to be the crucible of the domain knowledge, skills, conduct and practices. As a fellow of the institute, I can continually improve on all four aspects. Personally, it is also an opportunity for me to reconnect with former colleagues and friends who are also part of the Institute.

For me the appointment is peer recognition for my passion for advancing digital health. I have been fortunate to have been a part of the Australasian digital health community over the past decade. We live in a time where we have been given an opportunity to significantly reform healthcare delivery and the coming together of the digital health community is the catalyst required to supercharge these efforts. I look forward to contributing my bit in helping build digital health capability and awareness as part of the institute’s mission.

It means my ideals and efforts have been recognised by my peers; this only inspires me further!
I have been a registered nurse for over 30 years. Over this time, I have progressed to Nurse Practitioner (Primary Care) and most recently awarded a PhD in Digital Health and Informatics. I have had the opportunity to work on three continents, learning (personally and professionally) to deliver appropriate health and care needs in different societies and cultures. As a life-long advocate for people using health and care systems, my interest and beliefs developed in digital health, and its potential to deliver person/community-centred care. My research remains focussed on facilitating this. I remain passionate about preparing future, and facilitating current, health and care professionals for their role in digitally enabled person-centred care (breaking down the traditional silos); ensuring we equip all health and care professionals with capabilities to become the future leaders.

Since then my passion has been using technology to help with precise and automatic data gathering and using data science approaches to extract information and knowledge. Making such informed decisions can greatly enhance the quality of healthcare services while reducing pressure on healthcare.

AIDH fellowship is a recognition of my qualification, expertise and contributions to the field of digital health. Being a fellow of this community provides me with the opportunity to collaborate with the field’s experts toward providing and improving equity in healthcare through digital health solutions that ultimately influence the health and well-being of people, one of the main goals of the Institute.

The Fellowship provides me with an opportunity to engage further with the institute and the wider digital health community. Also, the Fellowship is an endorsement of my digital health experience and qualifications so far, thus an important milestone in my career.

AIDH brings together the best and brightest professionals and academics to collaborate and influence positive change across the sector. I’m humbled and honoured to have been accepted as a fellow of the Institute and look forward to contributing to advancing digital health across Asia Pacific.

As one of the points that was raised during the fellowship process pointed to, digital health work isn’t about IT services in healthcare, it’s about delivering health capabilities, enabling patient-centred care and ultimately in delivering and improving health outcomes. There are a variety of tools in our collective “sheds”. Some of us learn to build these tools, or learn how to use specific tools really well whilst other’s knowledge and skill seems more high-level.

To me as a clinician, becoming a fellow has crystalised years of work that hadn’t quite fit in with my medical fellowship or other areas, and now has recognition within this new college. It’s a unique college in that it brings together people from a wide range of backgrounds- technical, clinical, executives, administrators and policy makers. I see it as the beginning of what hopefully continues to be this discipline, or group of disciplines becoming an even more cohesive group of professionals leading health systems and health outcome enablement.

I graduated Medicine in 1983 and started down a long and winding road to a medical career. I was armed with ambition and altruism. Little did or could I have I realized where that road would lead. A career in general practice led to an introduction to and a lifelong involvement with information technology and health informatics. From DOS to Windows to Clinical Information Software to Medicare Online to the RACGP Guidelines for Computer Security to Standards to Healthcare Identifiers to Secure Messaging to Clinical Terminologies to Electronic Prescriptions to the Model Healthcare Community to My Health Record to Primary Care Quality Data to Telehealth to a world on FHIR.

It’s been an amazing journey. On the way I’ve met and engaged with countless numbers of incredible people who have made enormous contributions to the field of Digital Health many of whom I now count as lifelong personal friends. Digital Health is an amazingly diverse discipline with unlimited opportunity and potential. Ultimately when I think about why Digital Health is so important it is because it has the potential to improve the way in which healthcare organisations and healthcare providers deliver healthcare and help people. And that brings me right back to the reason as to why I became a doctor.

From both a personal and professional perspective, to be a Fellow of the Institute in 2020 gives me the extended opportunity to continue to contribute to the digital health future.

Looking forward to future interactions.

To me, the establishment of the Institute is an important step towards engaging a wider community of health informaticians and embracing the different backgrounds and experiences – across the spectrum of learning by education vs learning by doing. This includes those of us across the ditch over in New Zealand. As a former clinician with informatics training, I’ve been passionate (and persistent!) about interoperability, information modelling and electronic health records with deep involvement in standards including openEHR and HL7. We all know that informatics is about people, process and technology. What I have learned so far, as an academic and more recently as an implementer, is the overwhelming importance of people – especially the people we serve. This has recently led to changing my tack and getting involved in building patient-centred digital health solutions that bring their perspectives into care delivery. Through this fellowship I’m looking forward to connecting with others having the same passion and similar career trajectories and share my learnings.

I consider this Fellowship to be a privilege and a recognition of my contributions to medical informatics over 6 decades, made while my main responsibilities have been in clinical medicine, medical education and clinical research.
My first research was in 1960, 60 years ago, recording sequential blood pressures over 24 hour periods, demonstrating a previously undescribed link between a lack of night-time fall in blood pressure and early death. We commissioned and used pre-digital prototype equipment that recorded and provided the output. This blood pressure research generated my life-long interest in the relevance of body rhythms to clinical medicine and therapeutics and this contributed to my involvement in the use of computers to replace paper records, present clinical data graphically and analyse time-line data generated, potentially in real-time. A collaboration with Professor Adrian Smith and several doctoral students utilised Bayesian statistics to detect and quantify rhythms and change points in time-series data. We applied this AI to laboratory results after renal transplantation to detect and time rejection. We anticipated these techniques would be incorporated into the systems then evolving towards paperless medical records.

In the last 2 decades my clinical work was in regional Australia, including several locations with substantial Aboriginal populations. I incorporated the use of graphical presentations of data to individuals to explain deterioration and demonstrate benefits from intervention and of compliance. The statistical methods for time series analysis were utilised to make projections and demonstrate benefits from effective interventions in individual patients and on health service budgets, postponing or preventing progression towards the expense and inconvenience of renal dialysis.

Progress towards a paper-based record, providing interactive graphic presentations of progress and real time analysis of individual patient data was exciting in the 20th century. But the full potential is yet to be realised in the 21st century; my hope is that as a Fellow of the AIDH I will be able to create awareness among members and fellows of my past experiences developing and using clinical applications of informatics. Perhaps this may motivate those in a position to further progress the application of effective clinical informatics in the COVID-19 and, hopefully, in a post-COVID-19 era.

As a Fellow of the Institute, I look forward to contributing insights, innovation and mentorship to see our profession and area of expertise grow, respond and flourish into the future. As both a digital health professional and a registered nurse, I’ve proudly watched my colleagues lean bravely into new innovations and processes to provide quality and reliable healthcare to those in need during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Digital health has been a significant enabler during these times and I know will continue to be a critical driver of success across Australia’s health landscape. I feel humbled to be recognised for the contributions I have made to the field of digital health and am thankful to have been afforded the opportunity to step into this field by visionaries who recognised my passion and drive despite my lack of experience. As a member of this amazing community that has a vision of ‘Healthier lives, digitally enabled’, I look forward to continuing my contribution to this discipline, learning from my colleagues and to be a role model and mentor for those clinicians wishing to dive into this field.

It’s an absolute honour to be recognised as a Fellow of the Institute in 2020, and join an inspiring group of digital health professionals.

I hope to be able to bring some of the experiences and learnings I’ve gained from working on large scale implementations and programs for digital health solutions across Australia, and continue to work alongside other like-minded professionals in turning vision into reality.

I am proud to be part of this community of like-minded colleagues who represent and promote the profession. I am eager to continue contributing to the field of digital health, especially in working towards lowering the barriers to health data access and sharing for research purposes.

Now more than ever, we are witnessing the critical need for digital health solutions to support the health and wellbeing of people around the world. This is exciting but it also brings with it tremendous responsibility to design, develop and deploy high value, high quality and sustainable digital health solutions. Such an environment makes the role of the Australasian Institute of Digital Health of paramount significance. I feel very honoured and privileged to be a fellow of this Institute and have the opportunity to meet and work with so many knowledgeable and like-minded colleagues as we build the road forward for digital health. I look forward to future interactions and collaborations.

AIDH provides a platform for the best professionals to collaborate and influence positively across the field. As a clinician with informatics training and experiences, I would like to have contribution in interoperability, medication safety, artificial intelligence, data privacy – as well as avocation of digital health in Asia. I am looking forward to future interactions and collaborations.

The role of the AIDH is critical to help action these changes and I am honored to be part of it as a Fellow of the Institute. With over 30 years’ experience in health informatics and e-health I look forward to supporting the AIDH and its members to deliver future digital health innovation.

The adoption of information and communication technologies (ICT) to help efficient and effective management of the exploding information to achieve better and more cost-effective outcomes is a natural evolution. However, its journey in information and communication technology adoption has been relatively bumpy.
Digital (or electronic) health is very hard. It is hard partly because the technologies required to support complex health care management and coordination is still evolving very slowly, and also because health care knowledge and management are fuzzy, and more Importantly – the sector itself is tribal, achieving agreement on digital health standards is always very difficult.

That said, I believe in digital health. I believe that it is a powerful enabling tool that can maximise interoperability among people, information and intelligence to help achieve optimal health and wellbeing of people.
Years ago, when I was an academic, I used to tell students that ehealth was 30% about technology, 30% about health, and 40% about people, cultural and social dynamics. Success in ehealth depends not so much on resolving the technology challenges, but on understanding healthcare practices, and more importantly on successfully managing the people, cultural and social dynamics when developing and implementing ehealth standards. I believe that this formula to success still holds true today.

The AIDH, its members, Fellows – all have key roles in using this formula to maximise the power of digital health and interoperability to help achieve optimal health in our population.

As a member and Fellow of AIDH, I seek to be inspired and to inspire. I hope that as a community, we can collectively maximise the knowledge and power of digital health and interoperability.

Many things are known, and many more are being discovered. Being a Fellow of AIDH provides me the opportunity to promote the work that our community does, in my professional and personal activities. Given my background in cyber security and digital health, this means I can focus on helping protect the community’s data privacy, protect our health platforms from attack, and build trust in our digital approaches.

Marianne has shown me the value of working with interested and committed people to improve peoples’ lives. Our work is at the intersection of Computer, Medical and Social Science. I am a researcher, advisor and technologist with over 20 years’ experience working with remote health services. The value of formal, rigorous, quantitative and qualitative research in my field of digital health allows me to share disruptive innovations with the rest of the health industry.
I am currently working with a group of organisations to develop a primary health/Telehealth business model for rural and remote Australia. In the past few years, I have also developed an interest in the mechanisms and economics of the Medicare system. It continues to challenge the logical part of my brain why a well-researched and proven technological innovation like videoconferencing (eg Zoom) is not in greater use throughout the health system for isolated patients (ie remoteness, disability, age, etc).

The opportunity of the temporary COVID-19 Telehealth MBS items represents the best chance for our research to help those normally isolated through geography – not pandemic. I am working with Simbani Research, the Australian College of Rural and Remote Medicine , Broadband for the Bush, NBN, the Northern Australia Cooperative Research Centre, the Australian Digital Health Agency, Laynhapuy Aboriginal Health Service, Puntukurnu Aboriginal Health Service, Synapse Medical, Visionflex, eMerge, Biz365 and Asia Pacific College of Business and Law to expand access to digital health services.

My Fellowship offers me a further opportunity to extend my network of collaborators to include members and other Fellows of the AIDH to build the case for permanent Medicare Telehealth Items Numbers to service isolated people.

It is a genuine privilege to be appointed a Fellow and I look forward to contributing to the important work of the Institute.