News

Filed Under: HEALTH, People of the Precinct, TECHNOLOGY

Gold Coast Health charts new course for digital transformation

Gold Coast Health is embracing innovation and transformation like never before, with the appointment of Sandip Kumar in a newly created role as Executive Director of Transformation and Digital.

He shares Gold Coast Health’s bold vision to be at the centre of a world-class digital health hub here in the Precinct.

Sandip Kumar wants innovative companies to work with Gold Coast Health to drive transformational change in public health care, whilst also nurturing the aspiration to innovate that is prevalent amongst health service staff.

Prior to joining Gold Coast Health, Sandip was a Principal in the Client Advisory division at Queensland Treasury Corporation, whose core focus was on system transformation and sustainability. He brings a breadth of expertise in change and transformation, alongside a commercial background in corporate finance alike roles.

In the midst of the pandemic, we turned the ‘should dos’ into ‘must dos’, and now we need to figure out which of those innovations are truly sustainable in a business-as-usual sense”

Sandip Kumar, Executive Director, Transformation and Digital, Gold Coast Health

For a feature article in the international Technologymagazine.com (digital of course, and billed as the ‘digital community’ for the global technology industry), the change-driver is adamant that transformation begins with the right attitude, the right ideas, and the right delivery process. This is where technology can deliver endless possibilities.

“We need to make sure we’re not bringing technology from 1998 into 2021,“ he quips.

Gold Coast Health was well on the way to becoming a Digital Hospital – with the massive undertaking to introduce the integrated electronic medical records (IeMR) system completed in mid-2019, successfully overseen by now Queensland Health Chief Information Officer Damian Green.

As COVID-19 hit, the rapid response included not only caring for some of Australia’s first coronavirus patients, but significantly ramping up telehealth and medical simulations in a huge embrace of technology – almost 6,000 telehealth service appointments were conducted with 44% of outpatients treated remotely in 2019/20.

“We’re not just solving analog problems with analog solutions, but looking at how technology can help solve problems, as well as whether we can apply different clinical models, or new ways that non-clinical staff can interact with this space,” Sandip explains.

It is still early days, but central to future success is the new division Gold Coast Health has implemented. Sandip has divided the team into four core groups.

The first being Transformation Advisory team which is a small, interdisciplinary team of dedicated advisors with both clinical and non-clinical backgrounds tasked with identifying, defining and solving complex problems with staff and external partners which he says, “sets the foundation platforms for innovation”.

The next is the Transformation Office being the implementation branch – technology specialists and change management experts who can successfully drive new solutions that transition into the “new BAU”.

The following is the Digital Services division, which keeps the digital heartbeat and technical elements of the health service ticking. This stream makes innovation and transformation and BAU a reality.

Also, under Sandip’s watch is the Health Funding and Clinical Coding branch, who work to codify the clinical engagements patients have with clinicians to best tell the story of complexity and activity the health service is delivering.

DIGITAL ROADMAP - VIRTUAL CARE, DIGITAL LITERACY, SKILLS, SYSTEMS AND PARTNERS

Gold Coast Health is also in the process of developing its new D24 roadmap (Digital 2024) which has six pillars: virtual healthcare, advanced data and analytics, digital liberation, digital foundations, digital literacy and training; and maintaining and growing its ecosystem of essential technology partners.

Virtual health, where patients engage with clinicians using technology rather than traditional hospital visits, opens a whole raft of opportunities for patients by expanding the ‘digital front door’, including through advanced wearable devices and improvements in health literacy for patients. Virtual healthcare can help deliver improved outcomes for patients and more cost-efficient and resilient healthcare.

Digital literacy and training are key because staff need to be able to digest change in bite-sized pieces. Sandip says it is critically important to spend as much time training staff as it is innovating. There is no point in delivering more solutions if staff aren’t trained to use the systems that already exist.

Gold Coast Health is experimenting with the use of Virtual Assistance in health care. This initiative, led by a medically trained staff member, will be used to assist pre-admission and follow-up clinical practices.

This will be a gamechanger for healthcare,” Sandip enthuses, and believes it is also a key opportunity to build the GCHKP’s reputation as a digital health hub.

“We’re embracing a digital specialist workforce – employing data scientists and machine learning experts as data analytics is another key plank to enable both the organisation, and individual clinicians, to make better decisions and to help us set strategy to cope with the healthcare demands of a rapidly growing population and thrive in the future,” Sandip says.

“LuminaX (Cohort’s healthtech accelerator) is another great example of how we are looking outward as well as inward – we’re here to validate the ideas of start-ups and we’re interested in co-creating products and solutions.

And we believe our unique and open approach can also leverage big tech interest, basically multiplying our own transformation investments and increasing our chances to truly deliver transformational change in our public health system.”

With data-driven technology company Datarwe establishing in the Precinct last year to apply artificial intelligence to critical care data from the Gold Coast University Hospital (GCUH) and across Queensland Health, Sandip has a confident vision of companies clustering within the Precinct to create a world-class hub, especially as more physical space opens for co-location.

“From board to ward, we’re completely committed to innovation and digital health. We really look forward to not only driving it ourselves, but partnering at the hip with the organisations who are willing to go on this mission with us,” Sandip affirms.

We’re only another idea away from transformation.”

Filed Under: HEALTH, Research, TECHNOLOGY Tagged With: Covid-19, gene therapy, Griffith University, Menzies Health Institute Queensland, Professor Nigel McMillan

COVID-19 therapy breakthrough just the start of RNA medicine revolution

The Griffith University COVID-19 antiviral therapy research team: Professor Kevin Morris, Dr Adi Idris, Professor Nigel McMillan, Dr Arron Supramanin and Mr Yusif Idres

Griffith University’s Professor Nigel McMillan, of Menzies Health Institute Queensland, is naturally excited about the experimental gene silencing anti-viral treatment he and his collaborators have developed, that has proven 99.9% effective against COVID-19 in animal studies.

As he looks to begin a Phase 1 human clinical trial by the end of the year, the passionate gene therapy advocate believes the pandemic’s silver lining is the opportunity to accelerate a whole new family of precision RNA medicines, pushing development forward by up to 20 years.

Before the pandemic, few people outside health science circles would have heard of RNA medicines. Now the mRNA (Messenger RNA) vaccines produced by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna are household names and mRNA technology is viewed as the brave new world of vaccine development.

BioNTech had actually been working on its mRNA vaccine for well over a decade, so it wasn’t quite the classic ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ story, but COVID-19 quickly catalysed development that might otherwise have taken years.

“In a time of crisis and need, we find a way, and these vaccines are a tremendous example of that,” says Professor McMillan, who has been researching both infectious causes of cancer and gene therapies for more than two decades, the last ten at Griffith University on the Gold Coast.

This will grow a whole new family of medicines that are precise and personalised.”

The way forward is even more exciting thanks to large-scale interest and investment and the potential for using RNA in many ways – from coding a message to produce the SARS-CoV-2 virus spike protein (in the case of the vaccines) or any other virus protein for other vaccines; to ‘silencing’ the replication of virus cells in the lungs, in the case of his team’s therapeutic research.

Developed with Professor Kevin Morris and collaborators at the City of Hope cancer research and treatment centre in the US, the team have used siRNA (small interfering RNA) deployed directly into the virus genome via a ‘stealth’ nanoparticle.

“Our next-generation anti-viral works by stopping the virus from replicating in lung cells, the critical site of infection, and is delivered in lipid nanoparticles designed at Griffith University and City of Hope,” Professor McMillan says.

“It is designed to work on all betacoronaviruses such as the original SARS virus (SARS-CoV-1) as well as SARS-CoV-2 and any new variants.

Effectively we combined two technologies– the siRNA anti-viral with a highly-targeted nanoparticle delivery mechanism which is scalable and relatively cost-effective to produce in bulk and stable at 4°C for 12 months.

This work was funded as an urgent call by Medical Research Futures Fund and is the type of RNA medicine that can be manufactured locally in Australia.”

As they plan to pursue a clinical trial and hopefully commercialisation, Professor McMillan is a virologist in a ‘candy shop’ considering the potential opportunities for RNA technologies – from mRNA applications to make proteins for growth hormones and clotting factors to the BIG opportunity in personalised cancer treatment.

We can use precise RNA technologies like a volume switch to turn faulty genes down and even off.”

“We can sequence cancer tumours and find the genetic error behind a person’s individual cancer expression and silence that expression or edit it using CRISPR technology to add some extra DNA that causes the gene to be misread – like adding extra letters to a word so it no longer makes sense, and stopping the replication process.

Again ‘stealth’ nanoparticles deliver highly-targeted therapy, unlike more generic treatments such as chemotherapy.”

Indeed, Professor McMillan led world-first cancer research in 2019 that successfully used CRISPR for the first time to cure cervical cancer in mice.

With the Federal Government’s focus firmly on creating sovereign supply chains, particularly for medical products, the opportunity to be part of an emerging RNA technologies eco-system in Australia that extends from lab to large-scale manufacture is equally exciting.

“There will likely be a number of opportunities in different states to contribute to aspects of the supply chain, from pre-clinical R&D to manufacture of different types of RNA (eg mRNA, siRNA) and for different uses, mostly medical but also agricultural, which is a segment of the market Queensland might naturally be aligned to,” Professor McMillan says.

We could see a real RNA revolution over the coming decade if we can maintain interest and investment.”

Filed Under: Research, STUDY, TECHNOLOGY, Uncategorised Tagged With: AI, Datarwe, Griffith University, healthcare

Data partnership supports AI Hub for lifesaving healthcare

Dr Kelvin Ross, Chief Technology Officer Datarwe, with Dr Brent Richards, Board Advisor and Director of Medical Innovation, Gold Coast Health

The Gold Coast is emerging as a hub for AI in health – setting the scene for disrupting healthcare globally by enabling preventative medicine and personalising treatment, while significantly lowering costs.

As Griffith University and Precinct-based data-driven technology company Datarwe sign a major new partnership that will securely utilise valuable data to help some of the sickest patients while driving healthcare transformation, we catch up with Datarwe CEO Steve Woodyatt to explore the future possibilities.

The exciting partnership between Griffith and Datarwe will see the university appoint a new Chair in Digital Health and offer five PhD research scholarships to support potentially life-saving research as part of a five-year collaboration, which is supported through a $1.5m Advance Queensland grant to Datarwe.

And it’s just the beginning, according to Steve Woodyatt.

“The cost of healthcare is becoming unsustainable – there needs to be a major change in how we deliver and resource it,” Mr Woodyatt says.

We see an AI-inspired healthcare revolution.”

Research under the partnership will seek to help patients recover from severe injuries and infectious diseases and better manage treatments such as the use of antibiotics, as well as helping hospitals to optimise care through anticipating the right resources at the right time and implementing digital health solutions to personalise patient care.

The collaboration aims to build a world-leading Clinical Data Nexus (CDN), using de-identified patient data from intensive care units (ICU’s), and applying AI and machine learning to help researchers develop critical new predictive and diagnostic tools.

The Datarwe CEO says the partnership will deliver health and commercial benefits, with the goal of translating research into innovative digital health products that can be deployed in healthcare in Australia and overseas.

“What we have is a wealth of data – millions of data points from intensive monitoring of thousands of patients in acute care which requires expert ‘cleaning’ and ‘enriching’ by our team of data scientists so that it is ready to be used for research and development,” Mr Woodyatt says.

“We are not about replacing clinicians but assisting them to make informed decisions at the patient’s bedside. These data-enabled innovations will build upon the talent and expertise in our hospitals giving patients more personalised medical care.

Griffith University Pro Vice Chancellor Sciences, Professor Andrew Smith, says specialist data scientists at the University and Datarwe will come together with Griffith health researchers and clinicians, to maximise the value of the real-world data.

“This data is a rich resource that we can apply in many beneficial ways,” Professor Smith says.

“Our PhD research projects will be targeted to a range of outcomes; from improving recovery for patients with traumatic brain injuries, to better managing ICU resources in infectious diseases outbreaks, helping to predict risks of bacterial infection, and empowering clinical decision-making using medical data processing.

“Our broad research, under the direction of a new Chair in Digital Health, who will be an industry-focused academic and leader in the field, will cover the development of acute, community and population digital health systems that embrace genomics and also aim to personalise care through safe and reliable medical devices and the Internet of Things (IoT).

“Important issues of governance, policy, privacy, security and ethics will also be explored.”

The collaboration cements existing ties between Griffith and Datarwe, with the data lab already employing three PhD graduates, including Partnerships Manager Dr Stephanie Chaousis, who also runs health-focused programs for the Queensland AI Hub, and data scientist Dr Tina Nguyen, who has a PhD in Machine Learning.

“There are many current and increasing job opportunities in Data Science and at the same time there are so many resources out there for us to improve our data science skills,” Dr Nguyen says.

“This is one of the main reasons I chose this career and the incredible path it offers, and I love the Gold Coast and appreciate all the new opportunities that this health and innovation hub brings.”

With Griffith University recently ranked No 17 in the world AI Research Index, the highest ranking for a Queensland university, the new partnership is expected to strengthen the appeal of popular courses in the rapidly-growing field.

Globally, the digital health market is predicted to reach more than $660 billion in 2025.

Steve Woodyatt says the goal is harnessing the value of data hospitals already have to both improve patient outcomes and save costs.

“It costs $6,000 per day to have a patient in acute care, with a lot of data collected to directly guide their care – we need to leverage this retrospective data for secondary uses, from decision support tools to precise therapies,” he says.

“There is an ethical imperative to maximise health outcomes.

Through this partnership, and our close links with the Gold Coast University Hospital and other AI companies also locating into the GCHKP, we are well on our way to becoming a world-class hub for digital health.”

Datarwe is established as a public-private partnership with members including Amazon Web Services, KJR, and TechConnect, in partnership with the Queensland Government and Queensland Health.