Diapason @ DHF2023

A few takeaways from my visit to Melbourne for the Digital Health Festival 2023.

Like last year, the DHF is first and foremost a great opportunity to catch-up with friends, meet F2F old online contacts, and make new connections. After a quick bite in an historical pasta joint, this year "Diapason Festival Off" on the QT rooftop gave us the opportunity to enjoy the beautiful Melbourne Cityscape.

For the first day of the festival I focused first on the Mental Health stage. Co-design, lived experience, empowerment have been the recurring themes during this session.

Rachel Green gave us an inspiring overview of the challenges encountered daily by the persons living with complex mental health issues, and how her organisation SANE works relentlessly to empower them to overcome these challenges along a complex journey where they are at the center of their own story.

Dominique R. Hendren from Hello Sunday Morning drew a dire picture of our Nation's problem with alcohol. You may remember the "briliant" commercial results of the alcohol retail sector during Covid, well guess what - there is a health cost associated with this economical "success" :/

The conclusion of this Mental Health session was delivered by Chris Boyd-Skinner and his panelists Omar Dabash, Kylie Bennet and Qusay Hussain, addressing the risks and opportunitites of the Digital Mental Health Market, estimated to reach US$70B by 2030. Highly influenced by current #AI focus, this session covered well how fundamental it is to get the "model of care" right before involving tech in the process. Replacing the psychologist is not safe. Interoperability, data security, regulations, Ethics, accountability ... these are not specific to mental health, but they are even more critical there than they are in the "physical health" space. Same comment for the distinction between "wellness (unregulated) / health (regulated)" distinction. The key to Quality is Clinical outcomes / Clinical Evidence, although this is much more challenging for mental health than it is for physical health, as concepts like accuracy for instance are much more difficult to define - and the benchmarks and methods coming from e.g. imagery are not directly translatable.

Great to see then a insightful presentation about the NDIS by Jonathan Salgo. Something that was very relevant in regards to several of this year's startup exhibits, and very relevant to my own recent experience as a NDIS support worker.

Peter Vranes from Nutromics delivered a brilliant explanation of the roadmap they drafted for their transdermal metabolite monitoring technology, and why FOCUS matters!

Thank you Sylvia Pfeiffer from Coviu for a candid in-depth analysis of the differences between the US and Australian attitudes when it comes to adopting and deploying telehealth, and how the reimbursement system matters.

The talk about Design from Leah Heiss was really inspiring. It is always special for me to deep-dive again into the product design process. Leah illustrated brilliantly how co-design is actually done, and how it needs to be done not only for wearable and apps, but also for health systems and infrastructures (and institutions?).

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The second day kicked-off with the festival "all stars" panel of AI experts. Stefan Harrer, Johan Verjans, Daniel Yand, Nicholas Therkelsen-Terry, Farah Magrabi and John Halambka. They covered the main risks and opportunities raised by generative AI in Healthcare, emphasizing the crucial importance of human validation and having access to safe sandbox for experimentation, necessary to "understand more in order to fear less" (rings a bell? ) . They covered of course the buzzword of the month, the yet-to-be-created "smart regulations" necessary to ensure safe and ethical deployment of generative AI.

Stefan Harrer followed up on the latter with another presentation celebrating the publication of his framework . Very insightful illustration of a chatbot performance in addressing medical questions from Reddit users - both in terms of Quality and Empathy! Glad to see that Stefan is promoting further a lot of the ideas I defended when I presented with him back in 2021 .

The day ended up with the panel on VR and gamification Mc'ed by Zo? Callister-Hakewill with the talented Carolyn Mee, Dr Vijay Paul and Christian Doran who told the story of all the challenges they faced to push for adoption of their technology.

The festival final startup showdown resulted in a victory for Wirl, who are using the interesting "nutritional psychiatry" label, and who claim achieving "neural rewiring" with audio.

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The startups village was massive this year, and I did not even get a chance to talk to everyone. Glad to see many clients, mentees and friends there.

Resonait Medical Technologies - Focus Bear - Inflamed - Brenna - Goto.health - Memo Rehab - Shrinker

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A couple of personal comments for the organizer:

* The even could benefit from better acoustic design. I already noticed it last year, but this year the crowd made it even more obvious. By the end of the first day I was literally drained out having had to audiologically focus pretty much all the time.

* Less is more. A packed schedule is impressive on paper, but on the day it is quite a source of stress for everyone. No room for questions, and back-to-back sessions on 5 stages are very fragile to speakers overextending their time (stage moderators should be there to police the speakers where needs be...even of they are talking about regulating the industry LOL).

* The DHF app was a useless gizmo. Buggy as hell (Android), most of the time I could no see the current schedule. Spamming me with notifications at the weirdest times.