Talking HealthTech

Chris Smeed is the CEO and Founder of Cubiko, a business report and analyst tool made especially for general practices, and they are making a bit of noise here in Australia.   Chris has extensive experience in healthcare, cloud based solutions and accounting services.   He holds a Masters of Business Administration and a Masters of Professional Accounting, and he’s also an accredited BAS agent and certified Xero partner, so he has a lot of first hand experience about every facet of running a clinic - from balancing the books of a medical practice on a day to day, right up to reporting on performance to management and owners. In this episode, learn all about Cubiko how it came together, and the problems it solves for GP practices around Australia, big and small.   Chris speaks about the importance of integrations and API feeds to breakdown silos in healthcare performance measurement, and their ethos towards benchmarking nd keeping clinic data secure.

Karen Borg is the CEO of Healthdirect Australia, working with government partners to deliver innovative and trusted health information and services to all Australians so they can connect to the right care at the right time, wherever and whenever they need it. In this episode, Pete and Karen talk about the different offerings of Healthdirect, the important role they play in supporting the government find new innovative healthcare technology solutions. They also talk about the readiness for telehealth in Australia, where we stand compared to other parts of the world, and the carrots and sticks required to facilitate positive change to address complex health challenges.

Rami Weiss is the CEO of Healthshare.  Their mission is to improve patient health outcomes using digital solutions.   Over the past few years Healthshare has developed a raft of different solutions for Doctors and Patients to ultimately serve up better health information, which leads to happier healthier people. In this episode, Pete & Rami talk about the 10 year history of the company, their raft of products available for Doctors and Patients, and how they manage to market and grow their suite of different offerings to both B2B and B2C.  They also dive into the importance of accessible health information to help patients and doctors make more informed decisions for better patient outcomes, and reflect on how the start up landscape in Australia has changed over the past 10 years.

Sanji Kanagalingam is the Executive Director of Curve Tomorrow, who are at the intersection of healthcare, commercialisation and digital product development. Curve works with organisations, clinicians and medical researchers to bring life changing and award-winning health technology to life, from concept through to care. In this episode of The Talking HealthTech Podcast, Pete and Sanji talk about app development for healthcare, the successes and learning opportunities they’ve had to work out what works and what doesn’t, putting together a good business model around innovation and the importance of using design thinking to solve difficult problems in software development for healthcare.  Sanji also speaks about their ambitious target to impact the lives of one billion people.

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