Talking HealthTech

The episode contains a handful of genuinely useful practitioner insights - co-design failures as the primary cause of implementation failure, the federated model for eMeds, and the Lotus Notes legacy reality - but these are diluted by significant filler, repeated platitudes ('what problem are you solving' appears four or five times from different speakers), and promotional ad breaks mid-episode.

“Most technology or digital health solutions don't fail because they're not good. They're usually extremely good. They fail because they don't match the real world and that's the co design you need.”

“we've identified that there's about $3 million worth of savings that we can make per year because of um, the translations, translating language”

Most of the advice recycles standard digital-transformation doctrine (stakeholder engagement, define the problem first, benefits realisation), and the 'what are you solving for' mantra is recycled by nearly every panellist; the one genuinely counterintuitive moment is Emily's candid Lotus Notes confession, and Jane's observation that model-of-care-driven projects are rare but most successful adds mild texture.

“last year I re platformed Lotus Notes from one environment to another. Okay. You might remember Lotus notes from the 80s. Trailblazer for someone who gets up on stage and talks about leapfrog opportunities”

“I can count on my fingers that um, you know, maybe even one hand the number of projects that have been truly driven by a model of care”

The panel is genuinely senior and operational: a CDIO of one of Australia's largest health systems, the CEO of eHealth NSW, a former state-level Chief Digital Strategy Officer, and a national healthcare platform director - all of whom have personally led large-scale implementations rather than theorised about them.

“Robin Mann, I'm the Chief Digital and Information Officer at Monash Health. Um, and um, Monash is quite big. I think we did one in 15 episodes of hospital and Specialist Care in Australia”

“I'm Richard Taggart, the chief executive at ehealth New South Wales”

There are several concrete anchors - the eMeds $350M/$170M business case delivering $120M more benefits to twice as many hospitals, the $3M translation saving, the Joe Masters incident, and the 45% non-English-speaking population figure - but many answers stay abstract, and the specifics are unevenly distributed across a long episode.

“the original um, project, uh, business case for that was $350 million worth of benefits for $170 million of investment. Um, and in the end we uh, have delivered...to twice as many hospitals, delivered $120 million of benefits, more um, in less time”

“we have 45% of that population speak a language other than English at home”

The host shows moments of decent facilitation - deliberately surfacing a tension around stakeholder involvement slowing projects down, and trying to extract specific takeaways at the close - but there is very little genuine probing or pushback on any claim, questions are mostly open-ended invitations rather than challenges, and mid-episode ad reads break the conversational flow noticeably.

“On the flip side, it's a bit of a pain getting everyone involved from the very start though, uh, and it does slow a process down. There's always a trader I'm going somewhere with”

“Is there any material difference between, like, what are the biggest material differences between, like, a small deployment”