Ask not what it costs to invest in digital health. Ask what it’s going to cost NOT to invest, says the director of the Queensland Digital Health Centre.
The Australian healthcare sector is out of lockstep with our digitally modern society, according to Dr Simon Kos, CMO of Microsoft ANZ.
Speaking at today’s Connect Care Confidence 2025 Summit Dr Kos said healthcare was falling behind the digital pacemaker.
“I think about the transition that has happened in banking and finance,” he said.
“Once upon a time, as a banking consumer, you’d have a passbook, and you would walk up to the teller and you really didn’t know about the state of your finances, and that teller would be the interface to all of the information.
“That’s where we are in the healthcare system today, and it’s out of lockstep with our digitally modern society.
“People expect to be able to have the information pertaining to their condition, whether that’s travel or their banking or their retail, they expect to be able to see that information in the palm of their hand.
“They expect to be able to use that information to self-manage and when they need assistance, they expect that people who are providing those services have that same level of information.
“That’s what our society expects, it’s what we need for our age.
“But actually, it’s what all citizens deserve, and that’s how we address some of these challenges in health equity and stop people falling between the cracks.”
Professor Claire Sullivan, director of the Queensland Digital Health Centre at the University of Queensland, said evaluation of digital health technologies was lagging behind where it should be.
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“The pioneers of electronic medical records were the United States,” she said.
“In the US, you did not need a business case necessarily to put in an EMR [because] there were huge subsidies from the federal government.
“Now the rest of the world suddenly is at a point where we have to justify these huge investments that have already been made in other nations who didn’t necessarily have to do a business case or show a return on investment.
“And I think we’ve struggled.”
Professor Sullivan said showing a return on investment over 10 years on a digital health investment was a tough ask.
“I’m seeing is a real frame shift in the way that we think … we’re no longer saying digital health is an IT cost that needs to be recovered,” she said.
Instead, digital health investment should be viewed as an asset, similar to investments in other forms of capital infrastructure like roads and schools.
“An asset doesn’t necessarily develop or deliver an ROI over a specified time frame,” she said.
“It’s an asset and it’s the right thing to do.
“When we build a hospital, we don’t ask for an ROI and yet here we are still asking for an ROI for our digital technologies.”
Professor Sullivan said, instead, we should be using counterfactual models.
“If we shift to that type of model, you then have to say, ‘what is the cost of not investing?’” she said.
“If you do not have that digital foundation, you cannot use artificial intelligence in healthcare, you cannot do precision medicine, and you cannot truly have that seamless flow of information.
“You need to cost up what precision medicine is going to lose you. You need to cost up what not doing health care in AI is going to cost you. And compare that to the cost of an electronic medical record.”