Digital Health CRC, at Adelaide's Lot Fourteen from 2021, aims for high-tech analysis and solutions in health care
The Digital Health Cooperative Research Centre, based at Lot Fourteen in Adelaide city, brought high-tech analysis of health systems. Inset: Digital Health CRC's chief executive and global tech entrepreneur Dr Terry Sweeney.
The Digital Health Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) in 2021 made Adelaide city’s Lot Fourteen on North Terrace its home of national centre for innovation.
Started in 2018, the Digital Health CRC was a $200 million national organisation funded by the Australian government and industry partners including the South Australia government’s SA Health department, the University of South Australia, Flinders University and Alcidion.
As the world’s largest digital health collaborative, Digital Health’s aim was to fasttrack technologies and digital health solutions to the most pressing healthcare challenges.
Its new chief executive and global tech entrepreneur Dr Terry Sweeney said South Australia’s thriving health ecosystem attracted him to Adelaide and is the perfect fit for the CRC’s innovation centre and new commercialisation hub, Digital Hive. “This is a major win for South Australia, putting it firmly on the global stage in an important hi-tech industry, highlighting the CRCs focus on growing the digital economy. Bringing one per cent of the global digital health market to SA would represent $2 billion for the state’s economy.”
Formerly the global director of IBM Health Watson and a G20 advisor, Dr Sweeney said Adelaide had all the right ingredients here – a highly skilled workforce, a stable and open government, the best of health and medical research with innovation and entrepreneurship and international organisations such as Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services.
Among Digital Health CRC projects started in South Australia, led by the University of South Australia and SA Health, was a digital analytics tool to give notice of risk of adverse events in health care. The project, to help issues such as ramping, suicide prevention, medication and falls incidents, would begin in the large Central and Southern Adelaide local health networks clinical settings of the general medical and mental health departments.
Professor Marion Eckert, director of the Rosemary Bryant AO Research Centre at the University of South Australia, said the project team hasd already done research on an algorithm to more effectively inform safety, quality and risk management related to patient medication, using 18 months of data from the Royal Adelaide Hospital and The Queen Elizabeth Hospital: “Our tool will utilise existing software frameworks to build a visual interactive program that will be accessible and reported via a dashboard summary for clinicians and administrators. This will allow them to view real-time insights that describe risk exposure in the hospital setting.”