Talking HealthTech

Dr Michelle Perugini is the co-founder and CEO of Presagen, who recently launched their first product Life Whisperer; which uses AI to better identify healthy embryos for IVF, and to ultimately improve outcomes for couples wanting to have children.  In this episode recorded live at Startcon. Pete and Michelle talk about how Presagen is changing the way medical data from around the world is connected with artificial intelligence through their Open AI Projects, and how this approach helps them build more diverse datasets and maintain high levels of data privacy for their intelligent health solutions.   Michelle also reflects on how scaling in healthtech differs to other industries, as well as the hype vs reality of AI in healthcare.

Peter Birch speaks with Pete Williams, the co-founder of Medipass, a digital healthcare claiming and payments platform for providers and insurers.  Before starting Medipass in 2016, Pete co-founded Localz, a VC backed startup that powers last mile delivery experiences for major retailers and service companies.  Prior to joining the startup world, Pete led consumer and high-value payments technology - including HICAPS - at National Australia Bank.  He was also employed by KPMG where he worked on financial service and payment projects around the world In this episode, Pete and Pete chat about the complexities of healthcare payments in Australia, how we stack up to other parts of the world, the importance of partnerships with practice management systems and payors for HealthTech vendors, and many more.

Bringing in 2020 with a bang, this is a mammoth show to see in the new year! Back in November at the Medical Software Industry Association (MSIA) 2019 Annual Summit and AGM in Sydney Australia, Talking HealthTech recorded interviews with different speakers throughout the day.  This episode features 5 of these conversations covering a broad spectrum of issues that are pertinent to Australia’s health technology scene today.   The theme for the summit was “Limitless - Health Software Transforming Australia’s Healthcare”.  The event was attended by over 100 members of the MSIA, and had guests speakers from all over the country, as well as a special international guest.   This episode features interviews with:  Iman Ghodosi, Vice President of Asia Pacific at Zuora Igor Zvezdakoski, Chief Product Officer at Message Media Group Dr Ruth Webster, Global Head of Medicine at the George Health Technologies Dr Harry Nespolon, President of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) Steven Posnack, Deputy National Coordinator for the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, at the US Department of Health and Human Services.  Robert Best, President of the MSIA and CEO of MIMS AU&NZ.

David Dahm is a driven, motivated and dedicated individual with a raft of qualifications and experience, and an amazing life story. He is currently the CEO and Founder of Health and Life, the CEO of One Moment Foundation and is actively involved in industry associations across the Medical and Accounting professions. David is passionate about creating a sustainable and socially responsible healthcare system by promoting health and financial literacy in the community.   Most recently David is on a journey to establish the IHSEB - the International Health Standards & Ethics Board - in an effort to implement standards of healthcare delivery across the globe. Listen in to this episode of Talking HealthTech to hear more about the IHSEB, as well as David's story, what Doctors can learn from Accountants, and all about the concept of patient advocacy.

Dr Femida Gwadry-Sridhar is the Founder and CEO of PulseInfoFrame; a company that builds collaborative communities to enable the best value healthcare and cures for cancer and rare diseases.  As founder and CEO of PulseInfoframe, Femida has an extensive background as a pharmacist, epidemiologist and methodologist with over 25 years of experience in clinical trials, disease registries, knowledge translation, health analytics and clinical disease outcomes. Femida’s brain child is a cloud-based healthcare data insights solution called Healthie which is a state of the art analytics and visualisation platform built on the backbone of a dynamic registry. Healthie enables the integration of clinical, imaging and histopathology data as well as patient reported outcomes and natural histories.   Over her 25 year career, Femida has obtained more than 10 million dollars in funding for research, has published in top tier journals, and worked along-side the best in the world of medicine and business.  During this conversation, Femida chats with Pete about patient reported outcome measures, patient reported experience measures (PROMS and PREMS), clinical trials, and the use of health data.

Dr Louise Schaper is an expert in health informatics, and is passionate about transforming the health sector by leveraging technology to provide sustainable and better health for everyone. Louise is the CEO of HISA: Australia’s digital health community. In this role she brings together world-class clinicians, researchers, innovators and organisations from across biomedical, health and technology who are committed to the improvement of health outcomes enabled through innovative uses of technology and information. In this episode Louise talks to Pete about HISA and it’s role in the health community as well as the evolution of Digital Health.  Louise also delves into the importance of events to bring together the healthtech community, and the big themes in Health IT today. Overview [02:00] The background of HISA: Back in 1992 HISA was founded when computer technology adoption generally was low.  They became Australia digital health community.  Bringing the tribe of digital health ecosystem together  [03:40] HISA is putting out a paper about where they see digital health.  Sneak peak: before we spoke about health it, ehealth, digital health is interchangeable Digital Health is different to the application of IT in healthcare.  In 2019 they are leading that conversation - health in the digital age.  How does health transform to the fact world is digital these days.  Hard to implement. [05:50] The Australian healthcare system isn’t screwed, we deliver high quality healthcare to many people, but generally it needs to be fixed.  Not broken but could be better.  Not a fault of clinicians, technology doesn’t give them the right tools to do their job in the more effective way possible.  Work to do to change that situation [06:50] In America, $4.2 billion invested in digital health in first half of 2019.  A lot of money invested globally, especially in Silicon Valley. Since 2011, in US, $29.4 billion invested in digital health.  [08:00] Investing in healthcare is riskier investment, it’s not like other industries.  In healthcare, focus needs to be on the workforce.  No matter how much you invest and how great the tech is, the workforce needs to understand why we need to change in healthcare.  Need to change the business models of healthcare.  Need to be critical on how we look at technology while we embrace it.  This is not taught in uni for doctors.  Can’t just put devices infant of clinicians and expect them to embrace it.  Investing in upskilling workforce in digital health is growing area.  Seeing increasing momentum in dollars spent on this area.   [11:15] HISA is Independent but partners with many organisations including ADHA Australian Digital Health Agency.  Run events, forums, connect people who feel they are alone in digital health world.  Also working with nurses and midwives to build a digital health capability framweeworl for nurses, and ADHA is sponsoring that.  Will be launched next year - worlds digital health nuses and midwives coming to Brisbane next year, launching there.  Individual nurses and midwives, employers and educators to see what does a nurse need to know about digital health to be the best nurse they can be.  Upskill workforce, educators can plan curriculum, and nurses and midwives look to improve their career.   Workarounds are inevitable if training and onboarding in  [16:00] When we nail it, we can just go back to calling it health.  It’s not health IT, healthtech. E-commerce just became commerce and became the norm / they became redundant.  Eventually technology will be the norm and how we do things.   [18:00] The way we manage healthcare information hasn’t really changed  in couple hundreds of years.  Since Florence nightingale’s time.  She complained about the lack of information she could use for comparative purposes to help patients.  Things move slowly.  We will get to a point where Florence wanted where clinicians have real time info, live dashboards, helpful info to make best decisions

Matiu Bush is both a clinician and a designer who founded One Good Street, a social impact platform to encourage neighbour initiated care for older residents at risk of social isolation and loneliness.  Matiu is the Deputy Director of the Health Transformation Lab at RMIT, designing cultures of innovation and creativity in healthcare.  He has a Master's degree in Public Health and broad clinical experience as an emergency, oncology and intensive care nurse and he is also a sexual health Nurse Practitioner. He’s a board member of Better Care Victoria and the Emerging Leaders Clinical Advisory Committee.  He is a super active member of HISA, a Rotarian, and a mentor for undergraduates and post graduate science students.   Overview [01:30] Neighbour initiated care lifts the social capital in neighbourhoods, it improves house prices and creates an alternative value economy.  The One Good Street is a platform to enable and scale those initiatives. [05:00] Salutogenic Design can be used to avoid building tech that is beautifully useless.  It is about design that focuses on reducing stress levels and promoting wellbeing. Opposing the pathologising of humanity when you walk into hospital. [07:30] Guerilla information provisioning uses nudge theory to teach people about their health condition in the peripheries. [08:30] Citizen driven science looks at how to get citizens to help solve complex problems  [10:15] The RMIT Health Transformation Lab uses “The Treatment” as their design mythology, which involves ‘deep hanging out’, or anthropology (the study of humans).  Just shutting up and watching.   [10:30] They also use the Causatory reasoning method, which calls for ‘descending into the particular’ and ignoring generalisations.  [11:30] The saluto-technical approach marries salutogenic design principles with new technology, in an effort to stop the fetishisation of technology in healthcare.  Otherwise we are so close to data but so far from the truth. There is a need to provoke the sector to do better so we don’t design technology that is beautifully useless. [15:30] Technology needs to be designed while keeping the readiness of the health ecosystem in mind.   [17:50] The Cisco Digital Maturity Index helps you determine the level of work that will be required to implement new technology in a health organisation, depending on its appetite and ability to adopt technology.  [22:21] Matiu had a falling out with Mother Teresa in Tijuana… [24:00] Sanctuary trauma is what happens when you go into healthcare and they are meant to look after you and they don’t.  This can be avoided by involving the third sector of healthcare - those groups like schools, volunteers, rotary, Australia Post etc that have a legitimate place at the table with clinicians.   [25:00] Doing tech better in health will enable relational health - where doctors will ask more about your relationships to see a better ‘return on investment’ on your treatment, to help you stay healthier for longer.   Links Talking HealthTech Podcast Talking HealthTech Community One Good Street One Good Street Facebook Community Health Transformation Lab Rotary Transpire’s Vodafone Dreamlab Cisco Digital Maturity Scaling    Transcript [00:00:00] Pete: [00:00:00] Welcome to Talking HealthTech. My name is Peter Birch, and this is a podcast of conversations with doctors, developers, and decision makers that are playing in the Australian HealthTech scene today.  Here with me today's is Matiu Bush.  Matiu is both a clinician and a designer who founded One Good Street, a social impact platform to encourage neighbour initiated care for older residents at risk of social isolation and loneliness. He's the Deputy Director for the health transformation lab at RMIT, designing cultures of innovation and creativity in healthcare. He has a master's degree in public health and broad clinical experience as an emergency oncology and intensive care nurse, and he's also a sexual health nurse practitione

Julien de Salaberry is the Founder and CEO of Galen Growth Asia, whose mission is to build a sustainable and vibrant HealthTech ecosystem across Asia by scaling digital health innovation through industry partnerships. He has over 15 years of experience in healthcare with leading brands including Eli Lilly, Boston Scientific, Baxter, GSK, Merck&Co., and he has a deep understanding of healthcare in both developed and emerging markets. In 2012, he founded The Propell Group (TPG), a boutique venture investor firm, based in Singapore, which focuses on HealthTech startups and growth companies. Since 2012, TPG has invested in 23 companies including 4 successful exits. In this episode of the Talking HealthTech podcast, Pete and Julien talk about the key trends in Asia Pacific HealthTech, and some of the exciting technologies coming out of Asia solving big health problems.  Julien also deep dives into some of the more macro issues impacting healthtech in Asia at the moment such as the US/China trade war, and the United Nations Sustainable Health Goals for 2030.

Frank & Lorraine Pyefinch of Best Practice Software are two iconic and down to earth players in the Australian Practice Management System game.   Dr Frank Pyefinch is not only founder of Best Practice, but also originally the founder of Medical Director - the number 1 and 2 practice management systems for Australian GPs today, and have been for many years.   As CEO of Best Practice, Frank brings with him a long and proud history working as a busy GP, and Lorraine as a registered nurse - so together they understand first hand the challenges and needs of the medical community when it comes to software and technology. Overview [02:07] Genie was first created because Frank doesn’t like Mac [02:45] The first PMS in Australia (Medical Director) was created by Frank because the poisons act changed in Australia allowing typed scripts, which included computer generated ones.  [06:38] The break-even point for MD back in the early 90s was 200 sites.  This seemed an ambitious goal at the time. Today Best Practice Software has over 4500 sites.   [06:49] The name “Medical Director” came from Lorraine looking through Job Classifieds in Aus Doc magazine, and liking the attributes of a ‘Medical Director’. [07:58] The original Medical Director logo was created by Lorraine with the kids etch-a-sketch in the back of the family car [08:30] The first copy of Medical Director was sold on it’s launch at the AMA’s annual computer day conference in 1992.   [09:00] In 1994/95 advertisements started to be inserted into the Medical Director software, which subsidised the program heavily. [09:30] In 1999 Medical Director was sold to Health Communication Network (HCN).  Frank and Lorraine went to HCN with the business. [10:30] Frank and Lorraine left HCN in 2003 as they were dissatisfied with the increasingly intrusive advertising being placed in MD to raise revenue.  They sat out their exclusion period in their contract, and during that time Frank went back to being a GP in Bundaberg while writing Best Practice. [12:00] There were no standards for medical software at that time.  If there were, it’s likely the product would never have been built.   [14:00] Frank and Lorraine have seen Medical Software evolve from a text mode dos interface, to a graphical user interface, to the introduction of tables and touch screens.  Now seeing a bigger emphasis on communication, and also now a shift to the cloud, which is driving the development of their Titanium product to be released next year.  [15:07] Frank still does some programming in Best Practice even today, because he enjoys it. [17:34] Some of the government brain waves aren’t clearly thought out, such as the PHN’s collecting data for the QI Pip. [18:55] The biggest cause of support issues for Best Practice are Medicare claims not reconciling due to the archaic nature of the Medicare adapter.  BP is hoping Medicare shift to web services before BP release Titanium so they don’t need to integrate with legacy technology in the cloud. [21:15] During the roll out of the then PCHR, now My Health Record, during the Royal Review, Frank and Lorraine provided the suggestion that Doctors should be remunerated for uploading summaries to My Health Record as it was additional admin work they were not being paid for. [26:51] The BP Partner Program has been launched in order to give partners more controlled access to the BP database so they don’t need to hack their way in, and only get access to what they need - protecting the partner, the patient, the practice and BP.  [31:10] Pathology requests in PMS systems is standardised as SNP and QML, two competitors came together in the early 90’s came to the PMS providers and standardised the format of the forms, which set a format for future pathology vendors.  This didn’t happen with radiology which is all over the place [33:30] The ADHA is making strides towards their goal of interoperability, for example with secure messaging, although is Secure Messaging the best wa

How many places are your healthcare information kept? Wouldn't it be great if you could view it all in one spot? Healthtech start up Wanngi is taking on the bold journey to attempt to do just that. Maree Beare is the Founder of a HealthTech startup called Wanngi, an online health wallet that is implementing a social movement to empower people with their own health information. Maree was recently recognised in the top 50 list of Women leading Startups that are disrupting Healthtech  In this episode hear more about Wanngi and what they are trying to achieve, the benefits of consumer generated data in healthcare, and the challenges of implementing and integrating a start-up healthtech in Australia.