Healthcare IT Today Interviews

CSIRO’s Smart Health Checks is Bringing Conversations Back to Care

Healthcare interoperability is seen as a back-office challenge and it is rarely spoken about as a benefit to clinicians. But what if it was? Could it help accelerate initiatives?

An initiative in Australia is doing just that - improving data exchange to reduce screen time so that clinicians can focus more on conversations with patients.

Healthcare IT Today sat down with Kirsty Maunder, Senior Business Analyst at CSIRO’s Australian e-Health Research Centre. She explains how their Smart Health Checks initiative uses Smart on FHIR technology to pre-populate clinical forms and return providers to natural conversations with patients. You will discover how bidirectional data write-back stops transcription errors and why building from frontline clinical frustrations drives genuine technology adoption.

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Learn more about CSIRO's Australian e-Health Research Centre at https://aehrc.csiro.au/

Find more great health IT content at https://www.healthcareittoday.com/

Epic Agent Factory, a tool for Epic users to build their own AI agents, was announced this past January. Now, according to Derek De Young, Software Developer at Epic, the tool is moving into a new stage where Epic will quickly put it into the hands of their customers.

Agent Factory provides a platform to leverage 129 of the AI features in Epic. De Young describes three stages in its use. First, he expects organizations to shape existing AI features to the organization's policies, guidelines, data, and workflows. Next, they will build new agentic features for revenue cycle management, clinical decision making, patient engagement, etc. In the future, Epic will expand the scope of Agent Factory to use external connectors and run on partner platforms outside Epic, including Care Everywhere.

Learn more about Epic: https://www.epic.com/

Healthcare IT Community: https://www.healthcareittoday.com/

Cotiviti ties together providers and payers, including the top 25 US health plans, that collectively serve 300 million members in the United States. In this video, CEO Ric Sinclair describes how the "friction" between providers and payers can be resolved by leveraging smarter infrastructure like what Cotiviti provides.

Sinclair looks beyond technology and data, even beyond the use of AI, to talk about how an underlying platform can bring together all the expert insights and reduce the waste in health care. Ultimately, he wants to eliminate denials and appeals by "getting it right the first time" in billing. This requires more than the application of AI in "silos," which he predicts are not sustainable. "Coordination" is a key concept he shares while talking about being a healthcare infrasrtucture company that creates value for its users.

Learn more about Cotiviti: https://www.cotiviti.com/

Healthcare IT Community: https://www.healthcareittoday.com/

Standard networking events and leadership courses fail to keep women in digital health careers. Half of female tech talent exits the sector by age 35. The solution? Offering practical advice and operational mentorship from women who have actually been successful.

At HIC2026 in Sydney, Australia, Healthcare IT Today sat down with Anita Ghose, CEO at InventiveX and Program Lead for Women in Digital Health Leadership at the Australasian Institute of Digital Health (AIDH). Ghose breaks down why leadership development must center on hard-won deployment lessons rather than abstract theory. She also shares where Australian health systems are targeting AI investments to reduce cognitive load on frontline clinicians.

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Learn more about InventiveX at https://www.linkedin.com/company/inventivexai/about/

Find more great health IT content at https://www.healthcareittoday.com/

The health information management (HIM) profession is undergoing a massive worldwide evolution. AI require strict data governance to function safely, putting a direct spotlight on clinical data quality…and right in the wheelhouse of HIM professionals.

Healthcare IT Today sat down with Kathleen Rogers, Member & Profession Services Manager, and Danika Bakalich, Director of Workforce Advocacy & Development from the Healthcare Information Management Association of Australia (HIMAA). They unpack the worsening shortage of clinical coders, practical strategies to bridge the graduate training gap, and why health information managers must demand a seat at the executive table.

You will also discover why accurate clinical data management is fundamentally an issue of patient safety rather than just a billing exercise.

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Learn more about HIMAA at https://www.himaa.org.au/

Find more great health IT content at https://www.healthcareittoday.com/

One of the most interesting organizations in healthcare is Civitas Networks for Health.  This non-profit organization brings together some of the key organizations that provide the national infrastructure for health and health data.  One of their best venues to convene their community is at the upcoming Civitas 2026 Annual conference.

I recently sat down with Jolie Ritzo, CEO at Civitas Networks for Health, Anne Santifer, Executive Director at Arkansas State Health Alliance for Records Exchange, and Dan Cranshaw, Executive Director at KC Health Collaborative, to learn more about what's happening in the Civitas community and get a preview of their annual conference.  One thing they shared was how often healthcare infrastructure serves an important purpose but goes unrecognized. This is by design.  For example, an HIE (Health Information Exchange) may make a patient's information from multiple organizations available to a clinician at the point of care.  The clinician and patient often have no idea how the information from external organizations was made available to them, but having that data often improves care. Good infrastructure like an HIE quietly does this work in the background, often with little recognition.

Learn more about Civitas: https://civitasforhealth.org/

Learn more about Arkansas State Health Alliance for Records Exchange: https://sharearkansas.com/

Learn more about KC Health Collaborative: https://www.kchealthcollaborative.org/

Healthcare IT Community: https://www.healthcareittoday.com/

In every corner of health care—as with other industries—software tools are adding AI capabilities. AI has now come to HIPAA-compliant chat, as explained in this video by Jackie Frey, Product Expert - Healthcare at Zenzap.

Chat and text messaging themselves are complicated in a regulated environment. In the first part of our interview, Frey explains what secure chat must offer to be useful to healthcare organizations. Then, she shares what can go wrong when health care staff resort to common, insecure channels such as email and standard text messaging.

Learn more about Zenzap: https://www.zenzap.co/

Healthcare IT Community: https://www.healthcareittoday.com/

[SPONSORED] Custom APIs Are Failing Interoperability: How Agentic AI Replaces Manual Data Entry

Healthcare systems spend billions attempting to force disparate software to connect through complex data standards. What if agentic AI could solve the problem without complex integration or the need for universal agreement on data standards?

In this interview, Rishi Nayyar, CEO of PocketHealth, explains how their platform, Conductor, automates longitudinal workflows across legacy systems. Discover why electronic health records are engineered for data storage rather than process orchestration, and learn how applying automated AI agents directly to user interfaces solves cross-system bottlenecks without massive IT overhauls.

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Learn more about PocketHealth at https://pockethealth.com/

Find more great health IT content at https://www.healthcareittoday.com/

PocketHealth is a proud sponsor of Healthcare Scene.

The sudden emergence of AI models for all sorts of healthcare procedures, along with advanced hardware such as NVIDIA's GPU processors, creates questions for healthcare practices that want to improve outcomes and costs with these technologies. In a recent video interview, Dan Schneider, Enterprise Platforms Product Specialist at NVIDIA, and Sandra Colner, GM Global Healthcare & Life Sciences at Dell Technologies dove into these important topics and shared some key insights as healthcare leaders navigate AI in their organization.

Learn more about NVIDIA: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/

Learn more about Dell Technologies: https://dell.com/Healthcare

Healthcare IT Community: https://www.healthcareittoday.com/

Lindsey Bengfort, Managing Director, Healthcare Provider at NTT Data, cites two key principles that healthcare institutions are concerned with today. First, put the patient outcome at the forefront, which requires empathy but also a sense of urgency. Second, do more with less, which requires the right technology and, when AI is deployed, the right models for each situation.

Learn more about NTT Data: https://www.nttdata.com/global/en/industries/healthcare

Healthcare IT Community: https://www.healthcareittoday.com/