Let's Get Literal About Digital Health

In this episode of Let’s Get Literal About Digital Health, we explore how the regional NSW town of Forbes embraces the adoption of Active Script List (ASL) to support safer, more connected medication management. Host Brenton Jones speaks with local GP Dr Richard Draper, pharmacist Sarah Hazell, and community member Judith about their real-world experiences using ASL in everyday care. Together, they discuss collaboration across the community, the benefits of connected prescribing and ePrescribing by default, and how ASL played a vital role in maintaining equitable access to essential medicines during devastating flood events when parts of the region were cut off.

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Back in 2025, we sat down with Kieron McGuire, Director Foundation Products - Customer Experience and Products - Digital Solutions at The Australia Digital Health Agency to talk at length about Provider Connect Australia. Provider Connect Australia, or PCA for short, over the last couple of years has quietly sat in the background whilst big plans were underway to launch Health Connect Australia's Strategy and supporting architecture and roadmap. The Health Connect Australia strategy shines an important light on the role PCA can play in achieving convenient information exchange, but what's the journey ahead going to be like? What are the benefits now versus the future for registering a heatlh care business in PCA and exchanging your business information with partners? Join us as we try to lift the lid on PCA and make clear the strategically important role it'll play in facilitating seamless communication and information exchange for Australia's heath care ecosystem.

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Co-designing a culturally informed digital onboarding and patient engagement platform for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples living with chronic conditions is no small feat. We sit down with Lockie Cooke, CEO of iyarn, to discuss an exciting new initiative that hopes to address the low trust, poor usability and lack of cultural alignment that often leaves many First Nations peoples excluded from digital health practices. They're currently engaged in a project funded by the Digital Health Cooperative Research Centre (DHCRC) and in collaboration with the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), indigenous-owned digital agency NGNY and the Heart Research Institute's Djurali Centre. By listening to communities and working with them, embedding their voices into the experience, they're hoping to build technology that is genuinely useful and sustainable. For clinicians, it means ensuring First Nations patients feel culturally safe first, allowing for patient-reported outcomes and experiences (PREMs & PROMs) to support continuity of care with more meaningful insights.

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Primary healthcare businesses and workers are on the frontlines of patient care and cybersecurity threats. With sensitive patient data and critical systems at risks, a single breach can compromise privacy, trust and care. We chat with Professor Neil Curtis - Founder & CEO, Solve Transition, Adjunct Professor of Cybersecurity, University of Southern Queensland, and now Digital Compliance Manager for Hunter New England and Central Coast PHN, to outline simple, practical and actionable steps to effectively safeguard data and respond effectively.

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Dr Steven Grillett was always destined to come back home to Broken Hill. In 2023, with the love and support of his wife and kids, set up his own general practice. Since then, Dr Grillett has embraced the benefits of embedding a digital culture, ensuring he and his team are set up to handle change in all forms. Not afraid to try new things to ensure he has timely access to patient information, Dr Grillett shares with us his adventure to date and how continuous improvement and digital health go hand-in-hand.

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Rohan McKnight, Digital Health Manger at Coordinare South Eastern NSW PHN, joins me on the mic again to talk about secure messaging. Of all the digital health tools, secure messaging in Australia is perhaps the most confusing and frustrating experience for a healthcare professional. Change is on the horizon, but what does the future of secure messaging look like? How can secure messaging be made easier for clinicians?

We attempt to simplify and breakdown the history, future prospects and practical approaches to secure messaging adoption and use. Following the announcement of HealthLink changes at the end of 2024 and the national plan to position Provider Connect Australia™ (also known as PCA™) as the single source of information for healthcare providers, maybe secure messaging can have a new life.

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In this episode, we speak with two guests who are at the forefront of the technical evolution and future efficacy of electronic national residential medication charts (eNRMCs). Rohan McKnight, Digital Health Manger at Coordinare South Eastern NSW PHN and Magda Raban, Centre for Health Systems & Safety Research, Australian Institute of Health Innovation, Macquarie University talk in depth the important role electronic medication management options play in supporting the safe and secure prescribing and dispensing of medications to residents in residential aged care homes.

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In Episode 10, we speak with Gary Smith about the principles of information management for practice management. A new handbook titled 'Principles of Healthcare Practice Management', Gary Smith, and co-author Colleen Sullivan, meticulously explore the intricate landscape of modern healthcare practice management. We dive a little deeper into one of the essential principles: Information Management. From the importance of digital and data literacy to monitoring digital health maturity as part of continuous quality improvement, Gary makes it very clear how important technology planning and investment is in building and maintaining a sustainable healthcare practice.

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General practices collect a range of data such as patient diagnoses, medications prescribed, results of pathology tests ordered and even administrative data. Practices are increasingly using clinical information systems and data extraction tools to help tell a story and hopefully identify possible quality improvement activities.

LUMOS in particular is a unique reporting and data-linkage tool for GPs in NSW. The Lumos program links de-identified patient records from general practices with NSW Health records, to map patient journeys across the NSW health system. We speak with Dr Walid Jamal about how he uses data for continuous quality improvement practices, with a specific look at Lumos. We explore how his team benefits from linking his patient data set with the "system" to reveal new insights in how to be better at care delivery.

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In this episode, we chat with Delwyn Gates, General Manager of the Royal Freemasons' Benevolent Institution (RFBI) Dubbo Masonic Village, an aged care home in Dubbo, NSW. In February 2024, they announced the rollout of new telehealth 2.0 technology to improve the quality of virtual care for their residents. The all-in-one Visionflex telehealth cart enhances the way nurse staff can examine, diagnose, monitor, and treat patients when needing to consult in real-time with clinical professionals, no matter where they are located in the country. Delwyn walks us through their journey to date as they transition to a more mature digital health operation, providing safe and reliable access to care for all.

Podcast produced by Martin Franklin / East Coast Studio

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