Talking HealthTech

Talking HealthTech

Conversations with clinicians, vendors, policy makers and decision makers to promote innovation and collaboration for better healthcare enabled by technology. Learn about digital health, medical devices, medtech, biotech, health informatics, life sciences, aged care, disability, commercialisation, startups and so much more.

  1. 562 - The Future of Referral Management: Co-design, AI, and Statewide Collaboration

    HÁ 3 DIAS

    562 - The Future of Referral Management: Co-design, AI, and Statewide Collaboration

    In this episode of Talking HealthTech, Peter Birch speaks with Dr Simon Kos, Chief Clinical Officer for ANZ at Microsoft; Georgia James, Director for VicKey Statewide CRM at Austin Health; and Alan Pritchard, Director of EMR and ICT Services at Austin Health. The conversation covers the development and rollout of a statewide Microsoft Dynamics-based CRM for health services in Victoria, with a focus on digital referral management, patient communication, automation, and the use of AI in improving health system processes and outcomes. Key Takeaways 🏥 The Victorian Statewide CRM project, based on Microsoft Dynamics, began as a solution to surgical audit and patient communication challenges at Austin Health. It has since expanded, now supporting referral management and inter-hospital transfer processes across metropolitan and regional health services in Victoria. 📋 Managing healthcare referrals is typically a complex, paper-driven and inefficient process. The new digital referral management system standardises and digitises this workflow, improving efficiency, reducing environmental impact, and ensuring timely patient care. 🤝 The importance of co-design and collaboration between health services, IT teams, and clinicians was highlighted. Rollouts involved extensive workshops and change management, with an emphasis on capturing the "80%" common process across services while allowing flexibility for local variation. 🤖 AI is being explored to support and augment referral processes, such as classifying incoming documents, summarising referral content, and identifying hidden health issues within referrals. The approach ensures clinical oversight and gradual adoption for trust and safety. 🔗 The system is designed to promote federated innovation—allowing a collaborative framework where new features can be rolled out at scale and shared across services, rather than every service building in isolation. 📊 Leveraging enterprise data and digitising previously manual or paper-based MVPs (like post-it note reminders or spreadsheets) enables ongoing process improvement and scalable healthcare innovation. ⚖️ Equity considerations were also discussed: digital solutions need to be accessible, especially for vulnerable populations, to avoid widening the digital divide in healthcare. 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

    39min
  2. 561 - Transforming Medical Decision Making: The Future of Knowledge Management in Hospitals

    8 DE OUT.

    561 - Transforming Medical Decision Making: The Future of Knowledge Management in Hospitals

    In this episode of Talking HealthTech, Peter Birch speaks with Declan Kelly, CEO and co-founder of Eolas Medical, about the challenges and opportunities in healthcare knowledge management. They explore how clinicians can better access both external medical evidence and context-specific internal knowledge, the importance of technology in surfacing reliable information at the point of care, and the emerging role of artificial intelligence in supporting decision making in healthcare environments. Key Takeaways: 📚 Knowledge Management in Healthcare: Declan explains that clinicians need access to both external, evidence-based guidelines and internal, site-specific procedures to make informed decisions. Both are often difficult to surface when needed, leading to inefficiency and frustration. 💡 Origin of Eolas Medical: The platform was created out of a real need identified within hospitals—difficulty in finding practical information quickly, particularly context-specific pathways and contacts. "Eolas" is derived from the Irish word for knowledge. 🤖 Technology and Extraction: Eolas uses computer vision and artificial intelligence to extract and visually ground information from both internal documents (like policies and flowcharts buried on intranets) and external sources, ensuring that clinicians can trace answers to their original sources. 🔒 AI's Role and Safety Considerations: Artificial intelligence, especially large language models, can support information retrieval but must be carefully governed, regulated, and validated for safety and trust. The adoption of such solutions varies globally due to differing regulatory environments. ⚖️ Balancing Usability and Governance: Declan shares the tension between making technology user-friendly for clinicians and maintaining rigorous governance, security, and privacy—finding the right balance is ongoing and vital for uptake. 📈 Adoption and Impact: Eolas has seen significant uptake among clinicians by addressing their need for immediate, trustworthy, actionable information at the point of care. The company emphasises a careful, department-by-department rollout in healthcare organisations to build evidence and trust. 🚀 Future Directions: The conversation touches on the broad future of healthcare technology, speculating about the combined power of AI, knowledge management, and system interoperability over the next decades. 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

    31min
  3. 560 - Implementing New Tech in Healthcare: Lessons from Austin Health and Data Capture Experts

    6 DE OUT.

    560 - Implementing New Tech in Healthcare: Lessons from Austin Health and Data Capture Experts

    In this episode of Talking HealthTech, host Peter Birch speaks with Claire Holt, Technical Health Information Manager at Austin Health, about the role of data management and digital health transformation in tertiary hospitals. The discussion focuses on the integration of new data capture solutions within Austin Health, with a special emphasis on the challenges and opportunities surrounding legacy systems, workflow transformation, stakeholder engagement, and mandatory reporting. This episode was recorded live at HIC 2025 in Melbourne, Australia, at the Data Capture Experts booth on the expo floor. Key Takeaways: 🏥 Austin Health's Digital Landscape: With over 200 clinical systems, Austin Health's approach to technology must consider integration, interoperability, and minimising workflow disruption for clinicians. 🔗 The Role of Health Information Managers: Health information managers bridge the gap between IT, clinical operations, and data reporting, ensuring legislative compliance and meaningful use of collected data. ⚙️ Addressing Legacy System Challenges: Facing an end-of-life legacy software system that processed over 120,000 annual client contacts, Austin Health identified the need for a modern solution that could expand functionality and support broader use cases. 🚀 Implementation and Change Management: Accelerated timelines and the addition of new modules – such as community mental health – required robust collaboration, business process engagement, and agile change management strategies. 💻 Data Capture Experts Solution: Streamlined administrative functions allowed for improved referral, appointment booking, care management, and reporting – moving away from siloed spreadsheets towards integrated workflows. 📊 Workflow Evolution: The new system enabled better visibility across teams, accurate activity reporting, and improved patient care continuity, especially for patients accessing multiple services. 🤝 Advice for Vendors: Collaborative approaches with health information managers and strong technical-business translation are essential when building and implementing solutions in health settings. 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

    15min
  4. 559 - Faster, Smarter, Safer: The Future of Referral Management

    1 DE OUT.

    559 - Faster, Smarter, Safer: The Future of Referral Management

    A referral should be the start of a patient’s care journey, not a roadblock. Yet too often, paper forms, phone tag and admin delays get in the way. In this episode of Talking HealthTech, Peter Birch speaks with Emily Manning, Sales Manager at Global Health, about how smarter referral management is reshaping Australian healthcare. Emily explains how MasterCare+ streamlines workflows for clinics, hospitals and community providers – reducing risk, freeing up staff time and improving the patient experience. Key Takeaways: 🔄 Referral management is a critical but often overlooked part of healthcare workflows – getting it right improves both admin efficiency and patient care. 🧩 MasterCare+ is a modular SaaS platform that can run standalone or integrate with existing systems, making adoption easier. 🏥 The platform was co-designed with Peninsula Health in Victoria to ensure it fits local workflows, with secure messaging, triage tools and automated intake. 📊 Moving away from paper reduces errors, increases visibility via dashboards and KPIs, and frees staff for higher-value work. ⚠️ The risks of sticking with paper include lost referrals, heavier admin loads, compliance issues and slower patient journeys. 📈 Incremental adoption helps organisations modernise without full-scale system overhauls. 🤖 Future directions include AI-powered triage, risk stratification and ongoing development guided by user feedback. Check out the episode and full show notes at Talking HealthTech. If you’re enjoying the podcast, leave us a review and share it with someone who’ll find it useful. Want to connect with other digital health leaders? Join THT+ for access to our online community, meetups, exclusive content and more: talkinghealthtech.com/thtplus.

    16min
  5. 558 - Speech Recognition and AI: Enhancing Clinical Workflows in Healthcare

    29 DE SET.

    558 - Speech Recognition and AI: Enhancing Clinical Workflows in Healthcare

    In this episode of Talking HealthTech, Peter Birch speaks with Ricardo Herreros-Symons, Chief Strategy Officer at Speechmatics, about the evolving role of speech-to-text technologies and AI-driven ambient scribing in the healthcare sector. Ricardo shares insights from his 11 years at Speechmatics, discussing the challenges and opportunities of adapting speech recognition for medical applications, the move toward innovative AI solutions, and the importance of accuracy, privacy, and regulatory compliance in handling sensitive healthcare data. Key Takeaways: 🎤 Speech-to-Text in Healthcare: Speechmatics, while established in media, live captioning, and government, has recently seen growing demand in healthcare, driven by clinicians' needs rather than top-down mandates. 🩺 Ambient Scribing and Clinician Workflow: There is a shift from manual transcription—where secretaries or clinicians would type up notes—to AI-powered tools that can automatically transcribe and structure patient conversations, improving efficiency and reducing clinician cognitive load. 🎯 Accuracy and Context: In healthcare, accuracy is critical due to the potential for life-or-death consequences. Effective speech recognition requires comprehensive vocabularies, the ability to handle diverse accents, and context awareness to distinguish medical terminology. 🤝 Collaborative Role in Solution Delivery: Speechmatics provides foundational transcription technology behind the scenes, enabling ambient scribing platforms and EMR providers to build workflow solutions tailored for their users. 🌍 Language and Localisation: Healthcare consultations occur in many languages, requiring multilingual speech recognition models. Ricardo discusses how existing language models often excel in English but may need translation pipelines and continued development for long-tail languages. 🔒 Privacy and Regulation: Sensitive healthcare data requires robust privacy controls and compliance with regulations like ISO 27001 and HIPAA. Deployment options include on-premise and on-device solutions to meet varying security needs. 🚀 The Future of Voice AI in Healthcare: There is a growing acceptance of AI in patient interactions, particularly among younger demographics who are comfortable with bots. Voice agents and further AI integration are seen as significant opportunities for the future of healthcare technology. 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

    32min
  6. 557 - Breaking Barriers: Transforming Medication Management in Aged Care

    24 DE SET.

    557 - Breaking Barriers: Transforming Medication Management in Aged Care

    In this episode of Talking HealthTech, Peter Birch speaks with Phil Offer, CEO of BestMed, about the evolving landscape of medication management across aged care, primary care, and pharmacy in Australia. They discuss the challenges around syncing data between these sectors, the clinical and operational impact of medication errors, and how technology platforms like BestMed are shaping safer, more connected workflows. The episode covers the origins of BestMed, the importance of interoperability, regulatory drivers, stakeholder benefits, and the future of intelligence and AI in digital health. Key Takeaways: 📊 Medication discrepancies between aged care, GPs, and pharmacies are widespread, with a University of Sydney study showing 72.6 discrepancies per 100 records—many with potential for clinical harm. 💻 Digitisation and interoperability between care providers reduce manual transcription errors and potential incidents, with some facilities reporting a 63% drop in medication-related incidents. ☁️ BestMed's cloud-based platform is accessed by aged care staff, pharmacists, GPs, and families, with real-time medication records for safer and more efficient management. 🏛️ Regulatory standards and government support have been crucial in advancing interoperability and uptake of digital medication management in aged care. 🎯 Guiding principles for product design include minimising data retranscription, integrating into user workflows, and actively seeking feedback from stakeholders. 🔗 BestMed's recent integration with Best Practice Software aims to further streamline processes for GPs, minimising double-entry and enhancing workflow efficiency. 💝 The emotional impact of better systems is notable—staff feel more supported, and families gain visibility, ultimately improving experience and reducing stress. 🤖 Artificial intelligence is already in use for pharmacy packing checks, and future projects include AI-driven deprescribing and decision support—keeping solutions focused on practical clinical impact. 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

    29min
  7. 556 - Best Practice Summit 2025: Exploring Innovation and AI in General Practice

    22 DE SET.

    556 - Best Practice Summit 2025: Exploring Innovation and AI in General Practice

    In this episode of Talking HealthTech, Peter Birch speaks with Dr Jaspreet Saini (GP, practice owner and Chief Medical Officer at HotDoc), Nicole Gartrell (Programme Director of Health Connect Australia at the Australian Digital Health Agency), Craig Hodges (Group Chief Executive at Best Practice Software), Jessica White (Executive Director of Partners & Strategies at Best Practice Software), Frank Pyefinch, and Lorraine Pyefinch about innovations, challenges, and collaboration shaping the future of primary care. They discuss technology’s evolving role in general practice - from AI-powered efficiencies and foundational IT, to national health information exchange and ongoing engagement with clinicians. This episode was recorded during the Best Practice Summit 2025 in Brisbane and features a selection of conversations with GPs, practice managers, and technology leaders captured by Talking HealthTech during the event. Key Takeaways: 🖨️ Foundations Before Innovation: Dr Jaspreet Saini shares the importance of ensuring basic technology—like printers and seamless workflows—works reliably before implementing more advanced tools such as AI scribes in general practice. 👨‍⚕️ Addressing Clinician Burnout: Nearly half of GPs are experiencing burnout; technology should be implemented to reduce everyday frustrations and increase efficiencies, rather than adding complexity. 🎯 Real-World Problem Solving: Understanding daily tasks and pain points from frontline staff enables meaningful tech adoption. Stakeholder consultation—listening to GPs, nurses, and practice managers—remains central. 🔗 Health Information Exchange: Nicole Gartrell outlines Health Connect Australia's approach to connecting healthcare information systems nationally, focusing on enabling easy, behind-the-scenes data sharing across different clinical platforms. ☁️ Practice Management Software Evolution: Craig Hodges and Jessica White discuss the direction for Best Practice, including cloud migration, interoperability, and AI, while reaffirming commitment to customer feedback and practical functionality. 🤝 Industry Collaboration: Continued engagement with vendors, clinicians, government, and software partners is essential for sustainable change and responding to evolving needs in primary care. 🤖 Responsible AI Adoption: AI can facilitate easier access to patient data and streamline administrative tasks, but clinician involvement is necessary to guide responsible implementation and maintain patient safety. 🎓 Community and Education: Events like the Best Practice Summit foster connection, networking, and collective learning, while ongoing education around technology and new tools is pivotal for clinicians and practice staff. 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

    34min
  8. 555 - The Vision for Patient Engagement. Dan Stinton, Healthengine

    17 DE SET.

    555 - The Vision for Patient Engagement. Dan Stinton, Healthengine

    In this episode of Talking HealthTech, Peter Birch speaks with Dan Stinton, CEO of Healthengine, about the changing landscape of digital health platforms in Australia. They discuss Dan’s transition from digital media into the health tech sector, Healthengine’s evolution from a healthcare marketplace to a comprehensive patient engagement platform, and the introduction of new technologies like AI-powered receptionists. The conversation also covers trends in patient engagement, the impact of cost-of-living pressures on healthcare access, and the future of technology-driven healthcare delivery. Key Takeaways 🔄 Over the years, Healthengine has shifted from being purely a healthcare marketplace to emphasising patient engagement tools and SaaS products, such as online bookings, recalls, reminders, and custom forms. 🌐 The platform is expanding beyond GPs to include dental, allied health, specialists, and pharmacy - aiming to enable patients to manage their entire care team from one place. 🤖 Healthengine has launched "Helen," an AI receptionist designed to handle administrative phone calls for GP clinics, allowing reception staff to focus on more complex tasks. Helen is already being piloted and operates strictly on non-clinical tasks for privacy and accuracy. 📊 Research by Healthengine indicates around 80% of people are comfortable interacting with bots for administrative healthcare tasks, especially given the benefit of never waiting on hold. 💰 Cost-of-living pressures are causing more Australians to delay essential medical care, as reflected in the upcoming Australian Healthcare Index—a survey run in partnership with Patients Australia. 💻 Virtual care is on the rise, but still makes up a small proportion of Healthengine's bookings, with most telehealth appointments occurring outside regular business hours for transactional needs like repeat prescriptions. 🎯 Healthengine's current strategy is to continue investment in patient engagement technology, leveraging AI for administrative efficiency without entering the space of clinical care itself. 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

    23min
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Sobre

Conversations with clinicians, vendors, policy makers and decision makers to promote innovation and collaboration for better healthcare enabled by technology. Learn about digital health, medical devices, medtech, biotech, health informatics, life sciences, aged care, disability, commercialisation, startups and so much more.

Informações

  • Canal
    Talking HealthTech
  • Criado por
    Talking HealthTech
  • Anos de atividade
    2019 - 2025
  • Episódios
    581
  • Classificação
    Livre
  • Copyright
    © Talking HealthTech
  • Site do podcast
    Talking HealthTech

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