Welcome to Pulse: Amplify, where we sit down with the leaders and changemakers shaping the future of health. 

Dr Sara Riggare has spent more than a decade challenging one of healthcare’s most deeply embedded assumptions - that patients are passive recipients of care. Living with Parkinson’s disease and trained as a chemical engineer, she has built a body of work that reframes patients as active producers of knowledge.

In this episode, Sara shares her journey from diagnosis at age 32 to completing a PhD in ‘personal science’, where she studied her own condition to generate new insights into Parkinson’s. Her now-iconic “1 vs 8,765 hours” concept highlights just how little time patients spend in the healthcare system, and how much of their lives, and data, exist outside it. 

We explore why healthcare systems still struggle to recognise patient-generated knowledge as valid, and how this creates an epistemic gap at the heart of modern medicine. 

This is a powerful discussion about power, knowledge, and what it would take to truly design healthcare around the people who live with disease every day.

Resources:

Patients Are Not Waiting For Permission Lancet

Connect with Sara Riggare: LinkedIn

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This week on Pulse: Hot Topics, Louise and George explore the rapid emergence of AI health assistants from Big Tech, unpack the growing role of consumer wearables as research-grade medical tools, examine how AI scribes are evolving into multimodal and physical devices, and zoom out to a groundbreaking scientific achievement—simulating a living cell. 

AI health assistants from Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Perplexity signal a shift from standalone tools to a persistent, orchestrating layer across patient data, raising urgent questions about trust, ownership and the future role of the health system. 

A new partnership between Verily and Samsung could turn consumer smartwatches into research-grade data sources, unlocking new possibilities for decentralised trials, digital biomarkers and real-world evidence at scale. 

AI scribes are evolving beyond software, with vision-enabled systems dramatically improving accuracy and new purpose-built hardware like Heidi Remote signalling a move toward AI as embedded clinical infrastructure. 

And in a remarkable scientific breakthrough, researchers have simulated an entire living cell at the molecular level—opening the door to a future of in silico experimentation and personalised medicine at unprecedented depth.

Resources:
AI Scribe gets eyes npj Digital Medicine Link

Cell Simulation Link

EOI for the Chatbot User Guide for Patients Link

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Welcome to Pulse: Amplify, where we sit down with the leaders and changemakers shaping the future of health. 

Guy Tsafnat joins Pulse to unpack why healthcare is “data rich but evidence poor,” and what it really takes to turn messy clinical data into something usable at scale. 

He shares hard-earned lessons from building multiple startups, including why sales is harder than technology, how founders should think about co-founders, and why asking for help matters more than perfect pitch decks. 

The conversation explores why healthcare data is fundamentally different to other industries, why most data projects stall before delivering value, and what needs to change to make evidence-based care actually work in practice. 

Guy also gives a pragmatic take on AI in healthcare—why “rubbish in, rubbish out” still applies, where ambient AI is showing real promise, and why simply layering AI onto poor data won’t change clinical practice. 

Finally, he reflects on the realities of building a global health startup from Australia, including the challenges of selling innovation locally and the advantages of lower development costs and strong R&D support. 

Connect with Guy Tsafnat: LinkedIn

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Welcome to Pulse: Amplify, where we sit down with the leaders and changemakers shaping the future of health. 

A recent Nature Medicine study went viral after reporting that ChatGPT Health under-triaged more than half of emergency cases when tested using clinician-written scenarios. The finding raised serious concerns about whether consumer AI tools are safe for medical triage.

But researchers from Macquarie University’s Australian Institute of Health Innovation took a closer look at the study design and suspected the results might reflect the evaluation format rather than the AI’s clinical capability.

In this episode of Pulse Amplify, Louise and George speak with David Fraile Navarro about their follow-up study testing five frontier AI models across more than a thousand trials. Their research suggests that when AI systems are evaluated using more natural, patient-style interactions rather than exam-style prompts, triage performance improves significantly.

The discussion explores why prompt structure, forced answer formats, and restrictions on clarifying questions can dramatically alter model behaviour, and why designing realistic evaluation methods is essential as millions of people begin using AI for health advice.

The conversation also examines broader questions:
 How should AI triage tools be evaluated?
 What role should clinicians play in AI-mediated care?
 And what do patients need to know before trusting AI with health decisions?

References

Ramaswamy A. et al. (2026). ChatGPT Health performance in a structured test of triage recommendations. Nature Medicine.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-026-04297-7

Fraile Navarro D, Magrabi F, Coiera E. (2026). Evaluation format, not model capability, drives triage failure in the assessment of consumer Health AI. Zenodo.
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18975048

Connect with David Fraile Navarro: LinkedIn

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This week on Pulse: Hot Topics, Louise and George break down…

One of the biggest exits in Australian digital health history sees Sydney-founded telehealth company Eucalyptus acquired by U.S. platform Hims & Hers in a deal worth up to $1.6 billion, raising questions about the rise of global consumer health infrastructure and what it means for the future of care delivery. 

A cardiologist in Brussels places third in Anthropic’s global Claude AI hackathon after building a patient follow-up tool in just seven days, highlighting how domain expertise combined with generative AI tools could dramatically accelerate healthcare innovation. 

A massive NHS trial of an AI-enabled “tricorder-style” stethoscope shows the technology can dramatically improve detection of heart failure and atrial fibrillation — but poor workflow integration meant many clinicians simply stopped using it. 

Finally, a curious new study finds emojis appearing in electronic health records, prompting a light-hearted but serious discussion about clinical documentation standards, data quality and what happens when modern communication habits collide with medical records.

We are on tour!

Charlotte Blease of #DrBot book fame and Louise are hitting the road together. The Sydney event was fantastic, it’s not too late to catch the Melbourne book launch.

Melbourne: Tuesday 10th March 6.30pm, Mary Martin Bookshop, Southbank. Get tickets here

Visit Pulse+IT.news to subscribe to breaking digital news, weekly newsletters and a rich treasure trove of archival material. People in the know, get their news from Pulse+IT – Your leading voice in digital health news.

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Welcome to Pulse: Amplify, where we sit down with the leaders and changemakers shaping the future of health. 

Jordi Piera Jiménez joins Pulse to unpack the foundations of digital health.

Fresh from stepping down as Director of Digital Health Strategy at the Catalan Health Service, Jordi reflects on what most health systems are still getting wrong: interoperability that’s more theatre than reality, AI built on poorly structured clinical data, and the dangerous confusion of digital transformation with IT procurement.

We explore why public health systems should own their digital infrastructure, how procurement can be a powerful lever for change, and why clinicians must be better supported to understand that documentation is the core of modern healthcare.

Jordi shares a bold vision for the next decade: true digital public infrastructure, genuine patient agency over data, and platform economies that drive innovation without vendor lock-in.

A thoughtful, systems-level conversation about infrastructure, governance, ethics — and getting the foundations right.

Connect with Jordi: LinkedIn

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This week on Pulse: Hot Topics, Louise and George tackle big shifts in medicines safety and the accelerating global AI race in healthcare.

Australia moves toward a National Medicines Record

The Federal Government announces reforms requiring medicines prescribed via online platforms to be uploaded to My Health Record — including clinical context. With medication-related harm accounting for around 250,000 hospital admissions annually, is this the safety infrastructure Australia has needed for decades?

AI predicts 130 diseases from one night of sleep

A new Nature Medicine study claims a sleep foundation model trained on 585,000 hours of data can predict future risk of more than 130 diseases. Breakthrough preventative medicine — or promising science with important caveats.

China’s AI healthcare surge

China’s Ant Group health chatbot reaches 30 million monthly users, embedded inside Alipay’s super-app ecosystem. Meanwhile, China announces a $2–3 billion national AI healthcare strategy targeting population-scale deployment by 2030. Are we witnessing two divergent AI healthcare futures — cautious and regulated versus centralised and scaled?

We are on tour!

Charlotte Blease of #DrBot book fame and Louise are hitting the road together. Come see them in person and get your booked signed by Charlotte!

Sydney: Tuesday 3rd March 6pm, Gleebooks, Glebe. Get tickets here

Melbourne: Tuesday 10th March 6.30pm, Mary Martin Bookshop, Southbank. Get tickets here

Resources

Dr Sara Riggare’s Checklist and Resources for Meaningful Engagement of Patients Link

Visit Pulse+IT.news to subscribe to breaking digital news, weekly newsletters and a rich treasure trove of archival material. People in the know, get their news from Pulse+IT – Your leading voice in digital health news.

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Welcome to Pulse: Amplify, where we sit down with the leaders and changemakers shaping the future of health. 

In this episode of Pulse Amplify, Louise and George sit down with Grahame Grieve, creator of FHIR and one of the most influential global figures in digital health.

What followed was a wide-ranging conversation on community, leadership interoperability, and the impact of AI on healthcare. This episode moves beyond interoperability and into systems thinking, societal change, and the legitimacy of healthcare institutions in the age of AI.

Connect with Grahame: LinkedIn

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Dr Louise Schaper and Dr George Margelis are back with part 2 of their discussion to unpack the biggest healthcare story of the moment: Big Tech’s decisive move into generative AI for health.

January alone saw major announcements from OpenAI, Anthropic and Amazon One Medical, signalling that healthcare is no longer a side experiment for AI companies — it’s a core vertical.

Today we will dive into enterprise impacts, predictions, and provide a practical to-do list for health leaders.

We are on tour!

Charlotte Blease of #DrBot book fame and Louise are hitting the road together. Come see them in person and get your booked signed by Charlotte!

Sydney: Tuesday 3rd March 6pm, Gleebooks, Glebe. Get tickets here

Melbourne: Tuesday 10th March 6.30pm, Mary Martin Bookshop, Southbank. Get tickets here

Visit Pulse+IT.news to subscribe to breaking digital news, weekly newsletters and a rich treasure trove of archival material. People in the know, get their news from Pulse+IT – Your leading voice in digital health news.

Follow us on LinkedIn Louise | George | Pulse+IT

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Production by Octopod Productions | Ivan Juric

In our first Hot Topics episode of 2026, Dr Louise Schaper and Dr George Margelis unpack the biggest healthcare story of the moment: Big Tech’s decisive move into generative AI for health.

January alone saw major announcements from OpenAI, Anthropic and Amazon One Medical, signalling that healthcare is no longer a side experiment for AI companies — it’s a core vertical.

In Part 1 of this two-part conversation, Louise and George explore:

• What ChatGPT Health and Claude for Healthcare actually mean for consumers
• Why GenAI could become the default digital front door to healthcare
• How this shifts power, trust and expectations in the clinician–patient relationship
• The realities (and myths) around privacy, misinformation, regulation and safety
• What this moment means for healthcare business models, vendors and startups

This is a wide-ranging, honest and occasionally provocative discussion about where healthcare is heading — whether the system is ready or not.

 🎧 Part 2 will dive into enterprise impacts, predictions, and a practical to-do list for health leaders

Visit Pulse+IT.news to subscribe to breaking digital news, weekly newsletters and a rich treasure trove of archival material. People in the know, get their news from Pulse+IT – Your leading voice in digital health news.

Follow us on LinkedIn Louise | George | Pulse+IT

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Send us your questions [email protected]

Production by Octopod Productions | Ivan Juric