Talking HealthTech

In this episode of Talking HealthTech, Peter Birch speaks with Patrick Hart, a medical doctor and product lead at Concentric Health, about the vital topic of consent in healthcare. The discussion explores digital consent solutions, the current challenges with paper-based consent processes, how shared decision making can be improved, and what modernising the consent process means for patient experience and clinical outcomes. Patrick shares insights from Concentric's experience in the UK and their upcoming expansion into the Australian and New Zealand healthcare systems.Key Takeaways✅ Consent in healthcare is often treated as a tick-box paper exercise, conducted at the last minute with minimal patient engagement.🗨️ Shared decision making involves clinicians and patients collaborating, leading to better treatment choices and improved patient outcomes.🖥️ Concentric Health provides a digital, template-based consent platform that standardises information while allowing personalisation for each patient.📈 Standardised digital consent can increase shared-decision making from 28% (with paper) to 72%, significantly improving patient involvement.📊 Digitising consent reduces administrative burden, decreases on-the-day treatment delays and cancellations, and minimises errors and medico-legal risks.🌍 In the UK, Concentric is used in over 30 NHS organisations and across private health groups, entirely replacing paper consent in many settings.👩‍💻 The current Australian consent process mirrors where the UK was several years ago; there is opportunity for improvement through digital adoption.⚙️ Digital consent tools enhance efficiency, reduce environmental impact, and improve patient and clinician satisfaction.🔍 Concentric is seeking pilot partners in Australia and New Zealand to adapt and deploy their digital consent system.Check out the episode and full show notes on the Talking HealthTech website.Loving the show? Leave us a review, and share it with someone who might get some value from it. Keen to take your healthtech to the next level? Become a THT+ Member for access to our online community forum, meet ups, special offers and more exclusive content. For more information visit talkinghealthtech.com/thtplus

In this episode of Talking HealthTech, Peter Birch speaks with Leon Young, Founder of Cogniss, Dr Sarah Hanieh, paediatrician and public health researcher, Professor Caroline Donovan, clinical psychologist at Griffith University, and Adjunct Professor Annette Schmiede. The episode covers the 2025 Priority Digital Health Challenge, delivered by Cogniss AWS and the Validatron, supported by the AIDH, the Digital Health CRC, NextGen, and Talking HealthTech. You’ll hear from members of the expert judging panel and the two winners from the challenge.We explore how digital health solutions are being co-designed and developed for underserved, priority populations, with a focus on bridging the gap between research, evidence-based innovation, and real-world impact. Key Takeaways🏢 The Priority Digital Health Challenge supports the creation of digital health solutions for underserved and priority populations, focusing on real-world needs that often do not fit traditional commercial models.🤝 Initiatives like the Challenge help surface solutions arising from lived experience and subject matter expertise, particularly for communities and conditions often overlooked by mainstream systems.👩‍⚕️ A strong emphasis is placed on making the process less daunting for health professionals and researchers, who may not be traditional entrepreneurs, by avoiding typical startup competition formats.⚙️ Winning projects included Project Shine, a culturally tailored nutrition literacy tool for refugee and migrant communities, and Lights Out, an evidence-based child sleep intervention programme being transformed into an app.💰 There is a significant challenge in translating research-led solutions into accessible, procured offerings within health systems due to limitations in procurement pathways and funding.🗣️ Democratizing innovation opportunities and using co-design principles ensures voices from diverse communities are heard, leading to more impactful and culturally relevant solutions.🌏 Upcoming initiatives, like the Ripple programme, aim to scale the Challenge internationally, provide more sustained support to cohorts of solutions, and address systemic gaps in distribution and uptake.Check out the episode and full show notes on the Talking HealthTech website.Loving the show? Leave us a review, and share it with someone who might get some value from it. Keen to take your healthtech to the next level? Become a THT+ Member for access to our online community forum, meet ups, special offers and more exclusive content. For more information visit talkinghealthtech.com/thtplus

In this episode of Talking HealthTech, Peter Birch speaks with Bettina McMahon (CEO of HealthDirect Australia), Sanka Amadoru (Geriatrician and Founding Director of ARIA Health), and Elise Ford (Account Manager at Informedix) about the challenges and opportunities involved in building and sustaining multidisciplinary teams (MDTs) in healthcare.They explore approaches to fostering effective collaboration across hospitals, the community, and aged care settings, examining the key barriers such as siloed systems, workforce shortages, and the evolving role of technology, including AI. This episode was recorded live online as part of a special session with Talking HealthTech company partners, Infomedix. Key Takeaways🗨️ Barriers to MDT Effectiveness: The panel discusses the main obstacles to effective multidisciplinary teams, with the majority of the audience survey identifying siloed systems, data, and technology as the biggest barrier, followed by poor communication and unclear team roles.🧑‍🤝‍👩 The Consumer-Centred Approach: Future-ready teams will need to be structured around patient-centred care. Consumers are increasingly expecting to be active participants, managing their own health conditions with support from their care teams, technology, and peer communities.👨‍💻 Integration of Technology: Technology is seen as essential for providing visibility and coordination across MDTs. However, it's stressed that technology solutions must align with the real-world workflow of clinical teams and shouldn’t add unnecessary administrative burden.🤖 Role of AI in Healthcare Teams: There is optimism about the potential for AI to augment MDTs, from triaging patients to supporting decision-making. However, adoption must be pragmatic, with safety, trust, and workforce adaptation in focus.🔍 Evolving Models of Care: The panel highlights real-world MDT case studies in settings like ‘Better at Home’ rehabilitation, aged care, and digital health navigation, underscoring both successful integrations and ongoing gaps, especially where external providers or systems remain siloed.🩺 Pragmatism and Flexibility: The importance of practical flexibility in MDTs is emphasised, both in adapting to unique patient needs and in navigating imperfect or incomplete technology solutions.💼 Workforce Pressures and Training: The growing demands on the healthcare workforce, particularly in nursing, are creating urgency for technology to take on a greater role. The significance of digital literacy and ongoing professional development is also explored.Check out the episode and full show notes on the Talking HealthTech website.Loving the show? Leave us a review, and share it with someone who might get some value from it. Keen to take your healthtech to the next level? Become a THT+ Member for access to our online community forum, meet ups, special offers and more exclusive content. For more information visit talkinghealthtech.com/thtplus

In this episode of Talking HealthTech, Peter Birch speaks with Silvia Fazekas and Tracy Pemberton from Miller Blue Group about the critical role of change management in the successful implementation of digital health technology.Drawing on nearly two decades of practical experience in Australian healthcare and digital transformation, Sylvia and Tracy share their perspectives on the people side of tech projects, the importance of user engagement, and the need for ongoing support beyond the initial rollout. The conversation covers strategies for ensuring benefits realisation, managing stakeholders at all levels, and the concept of "enthusiasm as a service" to drive adoption of digital solutions in complex healthcare environments.Key Takeaways🤝 Change management is essential in digital health implementations because technology alone does not deliver benefits—people and processes are key.👩‍⚕️ Healthcare environments are complicated, and technology is often not the top priority for clinicians dealing with immediate patient care.🏥 Understanding clinical context, including terminology and frontline pressures, is crucial for effective change management.➕ Implementation support should go beyond emails and documentation, providing hands-on, in-context assistance and follow-up to ensure new systems embed successfully.🗣️ Engaging everyone, from frontline clinicians to executive leadership, is important for successful adoption. Senior leaders should understand and even use the systems being implemented.💰 Change management is often under-resourced in budgets, yet ongoing user support is necessary to realise the full benefits of digital transformation.🫂 Peer-to-peer support among users and visibility of improvements based on user feedback can significantly increase engagement and buy-in.🗨️ Users are encouraged to engage with change teams, provide feedback, and approach new systems with an open mind to maximise productivity gains and improve patient care.Check out the episode and full show notes on the Talking HealthTech website.Loving the show? Leave us a review, and share it with someone who might get some value from it. Keen to take your healthtech to the next level?Become a THT+ Member for access to our online community forum, meet ups, special offers and more exclusive content. For more information visit talkinghealthtech.com/thtplus

In this episode of Talking HealthTech, Peter Birch speaks with Greg Rosenbauer, CEO and co-founder of Your Brain Health, and Lynette Reeves, Digital Health Lead at Miroma Project Factory (MPF), about the process of building digital health solutions. The conversation explores challenges faced by founders, the importance of early-stage consultation before writing code, and the unique hurdles of commercialising research and scaling health technology products.Key Takeaways🔍 Building digital health products should not start with coding. Early focus needs to be on understanding the problem, the end users, and identifying who will actually pay for the solution.🧠 Validation through stakeholder engagement, workflow mapping, and customer experience analysis is essential before moving into technology development.✍️ Health technology projects require consideration of compliance, regulation, integration with electronic health records (EHR/EMR), and can rarely be solved in a single development cycle.📃 Many innovations stem from clinicians or researchers dealing with fragmented or inefficient processes, often starting as paper-based or spreadsheet solutions before evolving into scalable platforms.👩‍🏫 The commercialisation journey is especially complex for academic researchers, as there can be a significant gap between evidence generation and market readiness. Consultancy and grant support are key enablers.🏥 Accelerators, grants, and support organisations like ANDHealth and Cicada Innovations are available in Australia to help bridge the “messy middle” between research and commercialisation, but the process remains competitive and challenging.💻 Co-design with diverse clients and iterative development enable digital health solutions to remain flexible and relevant as user needs and market opportunities evolve.Check out the episode and full show notes on the Talking HealthTech website.Loving the show? Leave us a review, and share it with someone who might get some value from it. Keen to take your healthtech to the next level? Become a THT+ Member for access to our online community forum, meet ups, special offers and more exclusive content. For more information visit talkinghealthtech.com/thtplus

In this episode of Talking HealthTech, Peter Birch speaks with James Sneddon from Hyphen Health, along with advocates and creators Harper Valentine and Nova Hawthorne, about sexual health stigma and the systems that need to be fixed to make healthcare genuinely accessible for marginalised and underserved communities.Key Takeaways♀️Sexual health stigma remains a major barrier: Many individuals, particularly sex workers, avoid testing and seeking care due to experiences of judgement and misunderstanding in traditional health settings.👩‍💻 Online services increase accessibility and dignity: Virtual clinics and online platforms provide more tailored, empathetic, and user-friendly health services for sex workers, offering greater privacy and speed.🧑‍🤝‍🧑Importance of co-design and community feedback: Involving people with lived experience in the design and ongoing improvement of healthcare services is essential for genuine patient-centred care.👩‍⚕️ Advice for practitioners and the ecosystem: Treating everyone with dignity, listening to patient feedback, and maintaining a continuous inclusivity feedback loop are crucial for breaking down stigma and improving care.Check out the episode and full show notes on the Talking HealthTech website.Loving the show? Leave us a review, and share it with someone who might get some value from it. Keen to take your healthtech to the next level? Become a THT+ Member for access to our online community forum, meet ups, special offers and more exclusive content. For more information visit talkinghealthtech.com/thtplus

In this episode of Talking HealthTech, host Peter Birch speaks with Nick White from Alcidion about the challenges, strategies, and frameworks involved in developing business cases for digital technology initiatives in healthcare, with a particular focus on patient flow.Nick shares his experience on aligning technology adoption with organisational priorities, the complexity of healthcare funding and stakeholders, and ways to evaluate and communicate the impact of digital solutions, including real-time data platforms and AI capabilities.Key Takeaways:💼 Business cases in healthcare are complex due to the critical nature of outcomes, the many stakeholder groups, and unique funding models.🗣️ The aim is to explain, not justify, the rationale for adopting digital health solutions, ensuring alignment with strategic priorities rather than merely convincing stakeholders.😷 Patient flow is a national priority in Australia, presenting challenges such as ageing populations, staff shortages, and resource constraints that require better decision-making tools and operational workflows.👩‍⚕️Unlike other sectors, healthcare business cases must balance quantifiable financial benefits with intangible benefits like patient experience, staff wellbeing, and clinician workflows.🏛️ Frameworks like the quadruple aim (patient experience, population health, financial impact, and clinician experience) help structure business cases to reflect the multi-faceted value of technology.🔍 Using independent impact studies and evidence-based research is key to substantiating expected benefits and outcomes in business cases.♒ Ripple effects, such as reductions in length of stay or administrative burden, can free up resources elsewhere in the system, but translating these benefits into financial figures can be nuanced.💡Strategic alignment with existing technical architecture and organisational direction is essential to avoid unnecessary complexity and to maximise the impact of digital investments.🩺 Clinician engagement and change management are crucial, with a focus on making improvements that support, rather than disrupt, patient care.🤖 The future of patient flow technology involves greater AI integration, advanced mobile capabilities, and real-time information delivery at the point of care.Check out the episode and full show notes on the Talking HealthTech website.Loving the show? Leave us a review, and share it with someone who might get some value from it. Keen to take your healthtech to the next level? Become a THT+ Member for access to our online community forum, meet ups, special offers and more exclusive content. For more information visit talkinghealthtech.com/thtplus

In this episode of Talking HealthTech, Peter Birch speaks with Dr Dennis Rausch, Chief Medical Officer at Dedalus, and Viti Handyside, ANZ Country Product Manager for ORBIS at Dedalus, about the importance and benefits of structured data in Health IT. The episode explores the challenges and opportunities associated with embedding structured data in electronic medical records (EMRs), the impact on clinicians’ daily workflows, and the broader implications for patient outcomes, operational efficiency, and health system innovation. They cover both local and global perspectives, examining how structured data enables better care, supports research, and sets the foundation for advances such as artificial intelligence in healthcare.Key Takeaways:🏥 Structured data in healthcare is critical for accurate data analytics, decision support, interoperability, and operational efficiency.📝 Free-text notes, while common in clinical workflows, can create ambiguity, increase cognitive load, and make it difficult for machines to interpret and leverage health data.🔗 Embedding structured data entry into clinicians’ natural workflows is key to adoption, reducing manual data entry burden, and improving data quality.🤖 New technologies, including ambient AI, natural language processing, and smart EMR interfaces, are enabling more seamless capture and utilisation of both structured and unstructured clinical information.🔍 Structured data enhances research capabilities, supports the development of digital twins, reduces errors, facilitates compliance, and helps avoid costly duplicate testing and administrative inefficiencies.🌍 There is still a journey required for widespread adoption in regions like Australia, but growing interest and investment in digital health is driving progress.💊 Future healthcare ecosystems will rely even more on structured data to power clinical decision support, population health analytics, and personalised medicine.Check out the episode and full show notes on the Talking HealthTech website.Loving the show? Leave us a review, and share it with someone who might get some value from it. Keen to take your healthtech to the next level? Become a THT+ Member for access to our online community forum, meet ups, special offers and more exclusive content. For more information visit talkinghealthtech.com/thtplus

In this episode of Talking HealthTech, host Peter Birch speaks with Marvin Malcolm, Head of Data and Integration Architecture at Telstra Health; Duncan Weatherston, CEO of Smile Digital Health; and Keith Kranz, Manager ICT at SA Pathology.The discussion explores the role of interoperability and data standardisation in modern healthcare, focusing on connected care. The guests share their perspectives from both Australian and global viewpoints, diving into real-world experiences, challenges, and future solutions in pathology and health information exchange.The episode looks at technology choices like HL7 FHIR, the evolution of data-driven healthcare, and how digital transformation impacts clinicians and patients.This episode is part four of a 4-part series by Talking HealthTech in collaboration with Telstra Health and Smile Digital Health called Connected Care: Bridging Gaps in Modern Healthcare.Key Takeaways🏥 Interoperability Requires Collaboration: Achieving interoperability in healthcare demands participation from a broad community - no single organisation can accomplish it alone. Collaboration across healthcare providers, government agencies, and technology partners is essential.🌍 Australian and Global Perspectives: The interoperability and data fragmentation challenges are not unique to Australia. Similar issues (including North America and Europe) are seen globally, but approaches can differ based on local regulations, systems, and clinical workflows.ℹ️ Role of Standards like FHIR: Moving towards data-driven models and FHIR-based solutions is central to breaking down data silos, improving data quality, and ensuring meaningful use of clinical information.💻 Patient-Centred, Computable Data: The shift to giving patients direct access to health information and making results more understandable is highlighted. Clinicians and patients benefit from better visualisation, interpretability, and predictive analytics.🤖 Future-Proofing Healthcare: The ability to scale and adapt technology (such as with FHIR) ensures that healthcare organisations can meet growing data, research, and clinical needs, as well as adapt to ongoing innovations, including AI and predictive modelling.Check out the episode and full show notes on the Talking HealthTech website.Loving the show? Leave us a review, and share it with someone who might get some value from it. Keen to take your healthtech to the next level? Become a THT+ Member for access to our online community forum, meet ups, special offers and more exclusive content. For more information visit talkinghealthtech.com/thtplus

In this episode of Talking HealthTech, host Peter Birch speaks with healthcare leaders and innovators, including Auður Gudmundsdottir from Reykjavik City, Paula Bellostas Muguerza from Kearney, and fellow podcast host Shubs, along with Sophie Turner as co-host. The episode explores the digital transformation of community care services in Iceland, global efforts in women's health equity, practical challenges for clinicians working in health tech, and the impact of innovation in underserved populations.This episode was recorded during HLTH Europe 2025 in Amsterdam. To catch all the discussions that Talking HealthTech had during HLTH, including discussions with all the Australian organisations participating on the ANDHealth delegation, visit a dedicated playlist on our YouTube channel.Key Takeaways👴 Digital Transformation in Community Care: Reykjavik is implementing digital health solutions to assist elderly residents stay independent at home, including video visits, automated medication dispensers, and remote rehabilitation. Challenges include workforce shortages, shifting staff mindsets, and the need for national strategy.🏥 Scaling Technology in Care Delivery: There is a significant opportunity to expand remote care models, with estimates that up to 40% of current home nursing could be delivered through technology-enabled services.🤰 Women's Health Equity on a Global Stage: Women's health remains a critical topic globally, with a focus on making systemic changes in clinical research, guideline development, investment, and practical steps organisations can take daily. The importance of investment to drive real innovation was highlighted.👩‍⚕️ Role of Clinicians in Digital Health: Integrating clinicians into health tech teams requires a shift from token advisory roles to active participation in product development and quality improvement. Building collaborative relationships before formalising processes helps generate better outcomes.🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Underserved Communities and Technology Implementation: Global lessons can be learnt from the use of digital health and AI in low- and middle-income settings. Emphasising context-specific solutions and working backwards from real community needs is more effective than technology-driven interventions.Timestamps00:00 - 01:26 Introduction01:28 - 14:53 Audur Gudmundsdottir, Reykjavík City Welfare Department14:57 - 23:00 Paula Bellostas Muguerza, Kearney23:04 - 36:10 Shubs Upadhyay, Global Perspectives on Digital HealthCheck out the episode and full show notes on the Talking HealthTech website.Loving the show? Leave us a review, and share it with someone who might get some value from it. Keen to take your healthtech to the next level? Become a THT+ Member for access to our online community forum, meet ups, special offers and more exclusive content. For more information visit talkinghealthtech.com/thtplus