At the recent #HIC2025 conference (a "digital health" shindig), during a panel session that I attended as a guest of Microsoft Health Expert Dr Simon Kos, a key topic explored was: "How do we progress beyond the current state of 'digital health'?"
Earlier in the conference, Dr Norman Swan had put this bluntly to delegates, asking why, after decades of talking and building national and hospital digital health infrastructure, do we still feel patients and clinicians are not fully benefitting or leveraging the overall digital health investment better?
Every expert agreed: We need to innovate more, connect islands of data, embrace AI, and prevent new guidelines from becoming "boat anchors." This got me thinking... The "Digital Health" illusion For years, the notion of "digital health" has been treated as something distinct, a separate department, or as something we will obtain when we've implemented an EMR. There are conferences dedicated to the topic such as the one I attended, and there are training courses (some of which I have even designed and taught). But let's take a step back: do we say "digital banking" or "digital travel" anymore? No. These industries have digital workflows end to end.
Healthcare needs the same mindset shift away from thinking of digital health as something different, something special.
Time to scrape off some barnacles By removing "Digital" as prefix, can we move forward faster? Just as a ship collects barnacles that slow its progress, healthcare has accumulated outdated practices hindering true transformation. Here's some barnacles that got named during #HIC2025:
- Culture that talks innovation but rewards "cost take-out"
- Clunky patient portals and apps with poor user experience, and isolated systems
- Procurement processes that further encrust barnacles: Most healthcare tenders say they want innovation but often demand deep integration with outdated legacy systems which creates complexity and reduces choice.
Removing even more barnacles - putting healthcare in the "dry dock" Going beyond a scrape and clean approach, the following ideas were put forward at #HIC2025:
- Strategically and comprehensively sunset systems, eliminating paper gaps and batch processing bottlenecks. Clunky software, paper forms, unstructured PDFs and faxes are still stubbornly embedded in healthcare and act as huge barnacles on our ability to rapidly flow patient information.
- Free the data so it flows: Patient information trapped in silos means endless re-entry, missed connections, and "patchwork" integrations that feel more like duct tape than transformation.
- Judiciously and carefully start using AI for workflow optimisation and assisting information flow, first at an administrative level, and later (with assurance) at a clinical level.
The conference panelists advised us to think beyond AI being just "back-office cost-cutting." A start is with machine learning – it's already here, reducing administrative burden and offering efficiencies without the "black box" or hallucination concerns of generative systems. Over time we can include Agentic AI once it becomes more reliable, with strong guardrails and human-in-the-loop safety-by-design.
I would also add the need to look beyond the usual Western countries for inspiration and recognise that there are innovations in many countries such as India, Indonesia and Singapore that have (for example) pioneered low-cost diagnostics, scalable remote care, and they are working hard on national digital infrastructure – demonstrating what's possible with strategic vision and bold leadership - even when resources are constrained (or perhaps because of that - "necessity being the mother of invention" as my father used to tell me.)
What's Your 'Dry Dock' suggestion? In my view, "Digital health" isn't a separate discipline or a future aspiration. Our collective challenge is to stop thinking of digital as an add-on and start treating it as core infrastructure - and this can only occur if we take a funded, visionary approach to innovation in sector and seeing all components as a system.
I'd love to hear your thoughts. Let's start the conversation:
- Which "barnacles" frustrate you most in your daily clinical practice or organization?
- What's the boldest "strategic sunsetting" decision your organisation needs to make, and what's holding it back?
- Where's a lead-house innovation that you have seen, that we could rapidly adopt in Australia? #HealthcareInnovation #DigitalTransformation #FutureOfHealth #HealthcareLeadership #ModernHealthcare #HealthTech #PatientCare #ClinicianWellbeing
Leave a Comment