My View: Reflections on PDH's journey

eHealthNews.nz: AI & Analytics

Sunday, 27 August 2023

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VIEW - Precision Driven Health chief executive, Kevin Ross

Leigh Donoghue, Chief Data & Digital for Te Whatu Ora, recently highlighted the opportunities for AI to transform our stretched health system and the importance of investing in good partnerships. I agree and I am proud that Precision Driven Health (PDH), New Zealand’s health data science collaboration, has laid a foundation for success in this area.

We recently announced that PDH has completed its seven-year mission, prompting us to reflect on what we’ve learned and achieved along the way.

PDH formed when three very different organisations - Orion Health, Waitematā DHB and the University of Auckland, recognised each others’ strengths and chose to partner. Over the past seven years, 300+ people from 45+ organisations have participated, and we’ve been successful because of this exceptional network of advisors and contributors.

When we started out in 2016, only a handful of true data-driven decision support tools were used in our health system. New Zealand primarily relied on off-shore technologies and algorithms developed for populations that did not mirror our own. The resulting imbalance in benefits contributed to growing inequities.

Back then, AI was a distant and fanciful concept, unlikely to disrupt healthcare. Today, I have daily conversations with consumers, clinicians, software developers and planners who are exploring the latest tools. They are in awe of how far we have come as well as where we may be headed.

We now have a national AI advisory group, practical guides and governance tools, publications on how to tune algorithms to our unique population, and examples of how Māori can and do lead in data science. We have software that can ingest and interpret data of all types, beating human experts in a range of narrowly-defined, but quickly-broadening tasks.

We know how to detect bias, keep a clinician in the loop and a patient in the centre, de-identify data robustly, and handle missing data. We have a world-first in Te Pokapū Hātepe o Aotearoa the New Zealand Algorithm Hub, and Orion Health has launched its next generation Orchestral Health Intelligence Platform.

When clinicians, developers, and academics come together in partnership, initial skepticism gives way to recognition that unless an idea makes sense clinically, it will never be adopted; unless it follows good science, it will eventually fail, and unless it is implemented in a sustainable tool that produces more benefit than it costs, it cannot be maintained. Developers and academics care deeply about outcomes while astute clinicians swiftly grasp the nuances of technology and data. True partnership achieves orders of magnitude more than what we contribute individually.

Our tech sector needs a thriving health system, and equally our health system must have a thriving local tech sector. This symbiosis prevents inheriting models and technologies designed for other populations, and losing our voice.

Orion Health went out on a limb and poured funding, leadership, and expertise into something on behalf of both our health providers and the technology industry. The Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment provided the catalyst for industry investment through the partnership program, which has since closed. Our partners estimate that $38M of investment has produced many times that in both public and commercial value. Given these benefits, I hope that we find similar mechanisms to encourage industry-initiated research and development investment in Aotearoa.

I’m proud of the legacy that will come through the over 65 students who have been supported through scholarships, internships and project roles. We have clinicians who have caught the data science bug, and data scientists who have caught the health bug - and those experiences will pay big dividends.

We’ve seen the power of clinicians, Māori, developers and academics huddled around a whiteboard to serve a common purpose. If some measure of that culture continues to flourish in our health system, in our research institutions, in our technology sector, and across society then we can expect great results for years to come.