In the first of my second series of the Digital Ecology podcast I host a panel conversation about the role of simulation in healthcare professional training and how it applies to all stages of design, development and implementation of digital technologies in the NHS.

I'm joined by James Woollard, a child psychiatrist and chief clinical information officer along with Wendy Chapman and Kit Huckvale from the University of Melbourne who run an immersive simulation space.

We chat about the role of simulation in mitigating risk of harm when implementing digital health interventions and in working out unintended consequences of how a technology might work in practice. Simulation has a role in assessing complexity - taking into account the technology itself, environment, culture, people, process and how data works. We discuss real life examples of simulation in practice and the groundbreaking Validitron at the University of Melbourne - how it works with technology companies and researchers - bridging the gap between implementation and evidence generation. Simulating common scenarios can assist in exploring what could go wrong, reducing the cost of failure and improving uptake as well as the peripheral factors such as devices and connectivity.