Regular Pulse+IT readers will know that we have taken a dim view of the alleged activities of the much vaunted Digital Health Cooperative Research Centre (DHCRC) since its launch back in April 2018. We were suspicious of its worth back then and little has occurred to change our minds in the four and a half years it has been in operation.
It has gone through three CEOs, all of whom have left for reasons no one has been able to ascertain, and apart from a really good research project for aged care, nothing else has really made much difference apart from soaking up much-needed research funds that would be far better be used by the universities on their own research projects.
This week is a case in point. A new project has been launched looking at how virtual health technologies are best deployed in remote Indigenous communities, as if this is a new field of research no one has ever considered before. “The project starts with no assumptions about what does and doesn’t work,” lead researcher John Wakerman, a professor at the Menzies School of Health Research in Darwin, says.
Well, you probably should, mate. It’s not as if this is unheralded territory. Telstra has done loads of work in this area – not just building the actual infrastructure that clinicians and remote communities use but providing measurable outcomes that improve not just access to healthcare but save time and money for patients and providers – and they’ve been doing it for years. If you are still unsure, ask Queensland, which has also successfully being doing it for yonks.
According to the DHCRC, the project will include telehealth provider Healthdirect Australia, which will use the project’s findings “to optimise culturally safe and appropriate service workflows that can be implemented, particularly in video-based consultations”. Healthdirect has bucketloads of experience in this area – not just remote Indigenous communities but in other culturally and linguistically diverse communities. Again, it has a great deal of existing expertise in this area and we are at a loss as to why this has not been explored.
There’s also nothing for the digital health industry to cheer about with this CRC, despite the whole idea behind it being a partnership between public and private. All this one seems to have done is swallow up millions in funding from the government and the universities, while the private sector supposedly contributes ‘in kind’ to projects with no obvious outcome or worth. We don’t doubt that the emerging industry dedicated solely to extracting grant money for start-ups, dodgy venture capital groups and the new cult of ‘founders’ do well out out of it, but no one else does.
This story was fittingly of minor interest this week, but the big news was activity at the Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA). In quick succession it lost its lost its chief digital officer Steve Issa “for personal reasons”, and then signed up old mate Accenture for yet another three years to operate the My Health Record. This is Accenture’s third extension that we are aware of although the actual sums involved and contract renegotiations remain murky, but it doesn’t look like ADHA’s big plans for a re-platforming of the system or long-discussed consumer app are likely in the foreseeable future.
We’ve asked ADHA for interviews with its experts to discuss progress with the re-platforming and the consumer app, along with follow-ups to progress on the Provider Connect Australia system and on the modernisation of diagnostic imaging trial, which has been kept very hush-hush and about which we can extract very little information. Give us a bell if you know anything.
Finally, Pulse+IT is about to launch a brand-new website over the weekend, with data from more than 6000 articles being migrated over to a new platform, which we hope will make reading and commenting much more streamlined using more modern technology. It will look quite a bit different come Monday morning but our newsletters will remain the same. Wish us luck.
That brings us to our poll question for this week:
Is the Digital Health CRC a waste of time and money?
Vote here or leave your comments below.
Last week we asked: Are PHNs doing a good job in their role in digital health? While two-thirds of respondents said no, the one-third who said yes were more forthcoming with examples.
Here’s what you said.
Last week, we asked: Is the Digital Health CRC a waste of time and money? A big majority said yes: 86 per cent said were suss, while 14 per cent were keen.
We also asked why you thought it was a waste of time and money, or if you voted no, whether you could outline its achievements. Here’s what you said.
– Masses of money better spent within existing structures rather than a new structure which is more about an announceable than delivery.
– Too much overlap with similar organisations, e.g. AeHRC. Australia is too small for this level of fragmentation.
– Health professionals and administrators are sick of being forced to use terrible digital health systems which have no regard for the user and take valuable time and resources away from good patient care.
– No achievements and no innovation
– Very few early career research and workforce development – PhDs or Post doctoral positions/ multi-year projects were created . It was far too hard to get approved for anything unless it would make immediate big headlines – a quandry – most research builds upon incremental discovery. The CRC has failed so far to build up sufficient new workforce capacity or a strategic pipeline.
– Little achievements, Universities taking more initiatives on both research and workforce development.
– For all the reasons exposed in your article
– Digital health CRC has no clue for digital health, the old minded chair does not have any interest in technology except manipulation of business.
– It’s not a great model, to have a different organisation siloed from ADHA and Telstra Health etc. siphoning money for ‘research’, that appears to be minimally focused on implementation and actionable outcomes that could be of much higher impact. Is cultural sensitivity research really the most pressing issue to advance digital health in Australia? There are so many other more fundamental issues that could be headline initiatives, but instead we are going to get a bunch of surveys conducted that address a tiny portion of users, with outcomes that are not really transferable to the wider population. I.e., it’s ‘flavour of the month’ research that takes advantage of what’s topical, rather than what’s valuable.
– look for people who already have does this “Medisend”, yet again the opposite and on a different tangent they go. As you can see lost of wasted public money. We did it in a lot less than the 3 CEO’s salary.
– It has not achieved anything that is expected of a COLLABORATIVE set up. Seems to have fostered more competition than collaboration.
– After all this time (4 years) having only one remotely useful project, and now repeating work already done elsewhere – no more needs to be said.
– Research projects from entities and universities that serve their own agendas
– In principle it is good; in practice it is ineffective.
– Does nothing. Breaches confidentiality. More Government in medicine
– No accountability and no outcome which are dramatic for health delivery’s
– Most research projects appear to be scratching the surface, they are not exploring how to best transform from legacy systems to a well connected national health ecosystem. As far as I’m aware none of their research is focusing on evaluating or testing scientific and technical principles and standard infrastructure foundations that must be mandated to achieve semantic interoperability across a national digital health ecosystem.
– Unoriginal ideas
– Focus needs to be on commercialisation, but instead it’s on research.
– Its support of various training programs has increased the digital capabilities in the Australian health care system. Its website is terrible and it needs to do more to promote the work it is doing, but there is valuable research occurring, such as with Telstra Health.
– Support for digital health education
– What have they ever achieved
– No outcomes
– The CRC suffers from the same problems as the ADHA. Both have this idea that technology is good – it has worked well in other industries so it should work in healthcare. Unfortunately healthcare is different, both as a business and in what and how it gets things done. Hubris is a wonderful thing.
– There have been a few false starts with CEOs that didn’t understand healthcare, but, now with the new leadership U believe the ship will be turned around! The ACDC project is a good example of the positive work resulting from the CRC.
– THE STRUCTURE OF CRC’S is not effective to advancing usable research by providing Postgrad labour at an expensive price. The whole problem of delivering USABLE medical research requires effective testing, solid software engineering design, and persistent and durable maintenance of the deliverables, all of which are most often ignored by researchers.
– It is difficult for digital health companies to get publishable data on the validity of their products. It is surprising how little information there is to prove that these solutions actually add value. Coupling these organisations with actual researchers provides them with the rigger needed to correctly validate their software. If the DHCRC has limited results as this article states perhaps that is more a reflection on solutions not actually providing value rather than a failing of the organisation. Having read a lot of publish literature in this area there is really limited examples from the big DH players so I’m not surprised they are having difficulty bridging the gap between corporate and academia, particularly when academic research relies so heavily on work published in journals and far less on what is happening in the real world.
– Education initiatives have been amazing.
– lack of willingness to flex to partner with corporates
– The fact that I cannot provide examples of its achievements is not a failure of my knowledge, education or interest, but represents a failure of the CRC to promote, engage, communicate & publish it progress against milestones and any achievements (ergo: failure).
– Never even heard of this entity – had to google to find out more