With just over two weeks to go, our lineup reflects what you told us what you wanted.
Drawing on the feedback from our Health Services Daily readers to find the hot topics in the sector, we have put together a program for our next summit in Sydney on 11 September that will start timely discussions.
This summit is shaping up to be our most engaging event yet, and that is saying something because the previous Health Reform Summit in Canberra will be a hard act to follow.
To thank you for embracing and engaging with Health Services Daily, we are offering readers a 30% discount on summit tickets. To access this limited offer, register here and use the code ‘WHS30’.
So, what are the issues you‘ve told us you want to hear more about?
Top of the list for our readers is virtual care in its many shapes and forms – hospital in the home, urgent care clinics, remote patient monitoring, and digital therapeutics. This area is so big we have split it into two panels.
In response to one of our Health Services Daily stories on the confusion being created by the state and commonwealth rolling out urgent care clinics at the same time with almost the same name, Dr Amith Shetty contacted us and offered to help unpack some of the confusion for us.
He invited Bettina McMahon to talk us through the NSW Health Single Front Door Strategy partnership between NSW Health and HealthDirect. On this panel we also have Dr Suzanne Miller to talk us through the Victorian Virtual ED. Raj Verma has kindly offered to moderate what is sure to be a very interesting panel at a time when we all want more clarity.
The other area where there is huge interest is the hospital in the home (HITH) and remote patient monitoring space. We have had so much positive feedback from our stories this year that we wanted to showcase both the innovations in the field, and also investigate what we need to do to truly enable HITH to make it safe and accessible, and to take the pressure off our hospitals.
We will present a panel dedicated to this emerging space. It features Dr Emily Kirkpatrick, from the Medibank-Calvary joint venture, which is delivering one of Australia’s largest HITH programs; Voni Leighton, one of the HITH pioneers in Australia; Robyn Gillies, the Chief Medical Information Officer at The Royal Melbourne Hospital, who is passionate about connecting patients digitally with their clinicians; and Harry Iles-Mann, who has spent much of his young life navigating our complex fragmented health system as a consumer.
What else has got our readers all hot and bothered?
Big expensive electronic medical records is another topic everyone is interested in. With all the billions spent on them and still planned to be spent, will they be the holy grail to fix the interoperability issues between primary, acute and aged care we all so desperately want to see? We would love to say yes, but those in the know don’t think so because the problem may be more of a policy problem than a technology issue.
We are planning to unpack this in our first two panels. The government has taken its first step on the long and winding road to an interoperable health system with “sharing by default” and funding for new models of multidisciplinary care, which should see investment in a more connected ecosystem, hopefully.
We have international and Australian experts on our opening panel to discuss how other countries have tackled the issues we are now facing and to better understand how we can learn from them. Dr John Halamka, Ryl Jensen, Daniel McCabe, Dr Priit Tohver and Kate Quirke will kick off the day to remind us that healthcare is universal and we have so much to gain from sharing our experiences.
The second panel will drill down more into some of the challenges and opportunities that are happening in Australia at the moment. Speakers include Charles Cornish, who was one of Australia’s most successful medtech innovators until we lost him to the US; and Richard Nankervis, CEO of the Hunter New England and Central Coast PHN, the first pilot site for Epic in NSW. The aforementioned Robyn Gillies and Dr Suzanne Miller are also panelists, and Tim Blake has kindly offered to moderate this discussion for us.
Another topic dear to our readers’ hearts is data – data privacy, data quality and data liquidity. Good quality data and its ability to move with a patient is at the core of moving to value-based care.
With New Zealand being a global leader in data linkage and about to embark on the Hira strategy and Australia about to modernise the flailing MyHealthRecord, what two better countries to put together for a discussion about data?
The line-up of talent we have to discuss the important role data plays includes Ryl Jensen, CEO of the Digital Health Association of NZ; Dr Penny Andrew, Director of I3; Kate Ebrill, the interoperability lead at the CSIRO; and Dr Natalie Thorne, scientific director of Genomical. Jay Rebbeck has offered to moderate what is sure to be a great discussion.
Lastly, the issue that has got everyone talking – the wave of AI innovation sweeping the world. It has snuck up on us in Australia and we are scrambling to deal with the potential implications. We can’t say we can stop AI coming until we are ready for it, but we have invited three of our leading experts to talk about AI and what we need to be doing to understand and manage the incoming tide.
Dr John Halamka, President of the Mayo Clinic Platform, will share his thoughts and experience of working with generative AI and why he believes it holds both promise and risk. Our own Australian AI experts Prof Farah Magrabi and Prof Enrico Coiera will share their thoughts on how to prepare and mitigate the risks of AI in healthcare.
View the summit program and full line up of speakers.
Access our special 30% discount offer by registering here and using the code ‘WHS30’.