527 - Access to Equity: Democratising Healthcare in Regional Australia

In this episode of Talking HealthTech, host Peter Birch speaks with Elizabeth Holm Rannaleet, Head of Product for Data and Insights at Telstra Health, and Dr. Matt Burton, Lead Physician Informatician at Smile Digital Health. 

The discussion explores population health data in Australia, the challenges of fragmented health information, the role of data infrastructure and open standards, and the recent partnership between Telstra Health and Smile Digital Health. 

The guests examine how improved data sharing and the adoption of modern infrastructure can enable better health outcomes, inform policy, and support clinicians, researchers, and government agencies in Australia and globally.

This episode is part three 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:

• Defining Population Health Data: Population health focuses on the health outcomes of groups, tracking the prevalence and incidence of conditions in defined communities. Analytics in this space inform health policy and system design.
• Data Fragmentation Challenges: In Australia, health data is highly fragmented across general practices, pharmacies, hospitals, and government systems, making it challenging to draw timely or comprehensive insights for individual and population-level interventions.
• Role of Centralised Repositories: Establishing centralised population health data repositories would make it easier to identify health trends, allocate resources, perform preventative health planning, and respond to emerging health issues.
• Enabling Technologies and Standards: Open standards such as HL7 FHIR help connect disparate systems securely and enable meaningful, permissioned data sharing. This not only improves interoperability but also supports real-time, longitudinal analytics.
• Building Public Trust: Ensuring strong governance, clear consent models, robust access controls, and transparent communication is crucial to establishing public trust and realising the benefits of health data sharing.

Check out the episode and full show notes on the Talking HealthTech website.

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