DermNet founder recognised in Queen’s Birthday Honours List

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eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

Clinicians' Challenge winner 2017 and HiNZ Conference 2018 speaker Amanda Oakley has been recognised in this year’s Queen’s Birthday Honours List.

Oakley has been made a Companion of the NZ Order of Merit for services to dermatology.

Oakley is a dermatologist at Waikato Hospital and founded DermNet NZ in 1995, now the world’s most popular online resource for skin health.

Her proposal for a skin disease image recognition tool was winner of the Active Project category of the 2017 Clinicians’ Challenge. She will give a progress report on development of the tool at this year’s Health Informatics New Zealand conference in Wellington on 21–23 November.

Oakley says receiving the letter telling her of the honour was “a bit of a shock” and she had to sit down.
She hopes it will bring greater visibility to her work and the problem she is trying to solve, which is a worldwide shortage of dermatologists and an ever-increasing number of patients with skin diseases.

DermNet has several hundred thousand labelled images of skin problems and Oakley’s vision is to apply machine-learning technology to create a clinically validated tool that can help with screening.

She is also investigating the use of technology to give primary care better access to dermatological expertise, as there are few dermatologists working in the private sector.

Oakley already provides a teledermatology service as part of her role at Waikato DHB, using web form-based referrals with images, and is interested in how machine learning could assist in that.

“I want to ensure that primary care is equipped to diagnose skin cancer at the earliest possible time, particularly melanoma, because the skin cancer epidemic is huge and getting bigger every day,” says Oakley.

The $8000 she received as part of winning the Clinicians’ Challenge last year was used to hire an image technician to prepare images for a summer scholarship at Waikato University’s computer department to consolidate the image data base.

“A lot of people are very excited about this idea because there are too many patients with skin conditions and too few health professionals to see them and we really have to think smarter,” she says.

Read more about the HiNZ Conference 2018.

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