Digital Health Festival 2023 recap
Digital Health Festival 2023 recap
LF54 | Eleven observations from this week's Digital Health Festival in Melbourne
Attending the Digital Health Festival this week in Melbourne was a cathartic exercise for those nervous about the state of Australian healthcare.
This year’s 5,000 registrations doubled last year’s count, making the cavernous rooms in Melbourne’s Exhibition Center feel almost full. There were hundreds of startups - 300 turned up at the Founders Breakfast - tackling all sorts of intractable problems. There was sponsorship from a new breed of deep-pocketed corporates who have the DNA to do things differently, Salesforce and Zoom in particular. And there was a palpable let’s-do-this energy - supercharged by gallons of free barista-made coffee, #veryMelbourne. As such it’s possible to feel some comfort that our ever-mounting healthcare challenges are being attacked by a legion of committed change makers.
From two days spent schlepping the halls, listening to talks, poking into booths and drinking the coffee, here are eleven observations, with Looking Forward’s lens of ageing, longevity and impact.
1. There’s a solid business case for robots in aged care
The best presentation of the event, for me, was by Lee Martin, CEO of Tanunda Lutheran Home, in the Barossa Region of South Australia. He gave a compelling, thoughtful, data-driven and level headed presentation about robots: the need for implementation, the robust business case for them and the impact they were having.
Their robots are supplied by RV Technology and are mainly being used for pushing trolleys around and making deliveries. They did some analysis and found that the heavy, unwieldy trollies needed for managing their community were pushed 8600 kms / year, making 32,000 transports. Replacing many of these journeys with robots resulted in 260,000 fewer human touch points, reducing the risk of infection, lowered staff injuries, and allowed staff to spend more time with residents. The total cost is about $4.25/resident/day, and they documented saving 2.5 FTEs - $178,685 per yr. Additional benefits were less damage to the facility (humans making trolleys bump into things) and more efficient deliveries (robots don’t stop and chat en route). It all made me want to rush out and buy one.
2. Aged care tech is a hot mess
Lee also gave a plea for help as an operator trying to make sense of 420+ different software platforms in the market, and the 30 systems they have installed in their community, none of which speak to each other. And some of the tools don’t even allow him to extract the data into a spreadsheet; if you’re from one of those software vendors, I suggest you keep out of Lee’s reach, as his frustration was palpable, and he looks like he has a solid upper cut.
3. Personal monitoring is about to get much more interesting
The sight of a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) stuck in someone’s arm is increasingly common - no longer just for diabetes patients, companies like Levels are using them to help people optimise their diet and metabolic health. Melbourne startup Nutromic’s founder and CEO Peter Vranes gave an excellent presentation about their product that’s taking the concept of monitoring to the next level. Enzymatic sensors (eg glucose) have been around since the 1980s, whereas Nutromics is building a DNA sensor, massively expanding the clinical options. They’re already doing therapeutic drug monitoring, tracking levels of the key antibiotic vancomycin, and are expanding to sepsis, kidney injury and cardiovascular health (continuous measurement of troponin will be game changing for heart attack patients). With AUD $40m raised and some world class talent, this is a startup to watch closely.
4. The Royal Commission report isn’t helping the staffing crisis
One of the most common themes underlying the event was the staffing crisis, and a war for talent. At the same time a number of speakers talked about the Royal Commission Report into Aged Care. This important piece of work, finalized in 2021, was in response to repeated stories of shameful failures in the space - for example, Gretel Analytics founder Georgie Armstrong relayed the horrifying statistic of 150 rapes happening every week in aged care facilities across Australia. However, the reality on the ground as mentioned by various panelists was while its goals are laudable, its requirements for more metrics and data, and 24/7 human care, is proving challenging for operators without staff time and expertise to manage the training, data tracking or provide care, especially in rural areas.
5. Huggable robots will take your temperature
One of the most intriguing design concepts was from Monash University professor Leah Heiss’s talk - a sensor-laden social robot that could pick up, and hug a patient to provide social interaction and touch, that could also take vital signs. Of course, better to have humans to do all this, but see workforce shortage, above.
6. Beautiful, functional wearables
Leah also pointed to some work they’re doing designing new types of wearable monitors that look more like jewellery than clinical-grade, stigmatizing beige, ugly products.
7. The Green House model is coming to Australia
Craig Carter, the Chief Information Officer at Adelaide-based senior housing provider ACH shared recent news that they’ve agreed to be the first non-US site for implementation of the impressive Green House model for nursing homes. Started in 2003, this concept of small, more home-like communities (generally less than 20 residents) strongly emphasise agency of the residents and shared decision making. They’ve been able to provide a better, more empowered model of care while keeping costs similar to the more institutionalised facilities that make people shudder.
8. The reason why Dr Google is so dangerous…
Stefan Harrer, the Chief Innovation Officer at Digital Health CRC hosted an excellent panel on Generative AI. Daniel Yang explained why going to Google for medical diagnoses isn’t a great idea. First, they’re single, simple queries, not Boolean - not a composite collection of multiple different inputs that are daisy-chained together to get better results (which is how we’re now being trained by ChatGPT). But more important, Google rewards results with higher click through rates - so that random pain you’re experiencing may be nothing, but because ALS results get the most (panicked) click throughs, they appear higher. So we’re all walking around in permanent state of mortal fear.
9. But GenerativeAI’s confidence can be even more alarming
While GenerativeAI is a more natural and powerful search experience, the confidence with which is generates (rather than just points to) results can be its achilles heel. Digital health superstar John Halamka joined Stefan’s panel by Zoom. John’s serves as President, ‘Mayo Clinic Platform’, charged with building the digital presence for one of the world’s most trusted and iconic health brands. He recalled a fascinating test conversation between one of Mayo’s leading cardiologists and ChatGPT, about whether it was safe to do a procedure. ChatGPT’s confident response was yes, it was safe, and here are two articles by famous people in a leading journal. The quotes were made up and the journal didn’t exist.
This is not to discount the remarkable breakthrough that Generative AI represents, more to make people aware of the new heightened skill of BS detectors that we need to hone. John’s been driving an industry-wide effort to hardness the power of AI to improve health, with the Coalition for Health AI (CHAI), which in April shared five principles for ‘trustworthy implementation in AI’ (acronym FAVES): Fair, Appropriate, Valid, Equitable and Safe. More information from their Blueprint here.
10. In praise of NDIS, mostly
Jonathan Salgo, the founder of HeyHubble, a startup marketplace supporting members of Australia’s National Disability Insurance Service (NDIS) made an excellent presentation (and btw an excellent post-event beer-companion). He talked about the remarkable achievement of the NDIS, and also highlighted the need for human centered design.
As the slides above show, the NDIS has fundamentally changed the paradigm for care, empowering and financing the individuals themselves, allowing more of a market centered on the individual’s needs. It’s not cheap - over AUD $40 billion today and $50 billion within a few years. But it’s had a remarkable impact on recipients (and in my view, in a way that those in the aged care business could learn much from).
“What I really need is an orgasm” - NDIS focus group participant
Jonathan noted that we’ve still got a way to go before we’re genuinely human centered however; a recent focus group on how best to provide the ‘needs’ of NDIS recipients was going swimmingly, with standard requests such as I need a job, wheelchair or dog. But then a lady said, look, “what I really need is an orgasm”, and the bureaucrats were speechless. This is a fundamental human need but blew their minds. Still some way to go before we’re truly human centric then.
11. Health is still largely clinical and aged care-focused
The conference was created by the same team behind the 2021 Aged Care Innovation conference (which I spoke at). Maybe because of that DNA, or because of the changing demographics, the majority of the panels and exhibitors seemed to be focused on ageing populations.
Notwithstanding the winner of the pitch event was a nutriton app, Wirl, is focused on diet, there was a notable absence of wellness and social determinants of health. Presumably related to the lack of a business model for unplugging, sleeping more and enjoying time with your kids.
I bumped into the event’s founder, Hamish Steel, and asked him for personal highlights. He pointed to the generative AI panel, the Founders Breakfast and Lily Lui's talk on digital health implementation at Western Health. He also pointed to a couple of topics that stretch the boundaries of ‘traditional’ health conferences, “We had great feedback on the health equity panel, and were happy to bring a sexual wellness panel to the health conference format - not something that is touched upon at most other events”. Personally I’d like to see more about lifelong longevity, Web3 and social determinants of health, and I expect near year’s event (May 6-7, 2024) will feature more of all of these.
Kudos to the organizers (I know how hard putting these events on is) and a huge thanks to pioneering agetech pioneer Georgie Armstrong for getting me there.