NIIN Health Alliance Bulletin – July 2024

July 2024

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The National Industry Innovation Network (NIIN) is a dynamic network that brings together industry, university and government partners to drive digital technology advancements in economy and society. With its ready-to-access capability and existing infrastructure, the NIIN Health Alliance provides a low-risk avenue for health agencies and hospital operators to engage in innovation activities. The NIIN Innovation Centrals, Research Chairs, health-focused labs, and specialised technology centres serve as a collaborative hub for industry, health agencies, hospital operators, researchers, and students tackling critical healthcare challenges, collectively using digital innovation.

In this bulletin we are thrilled to bring you a selection of the exciting developments and projects emerging from the NIIN Health Alliance. Please get in touch to learn more and join our efforts!

NIIN Health Alliance Highlights

Singapore NIIN Health Alliance Summit 2024 – Save the dates!
We are thrilled to announce the Singapore NIIN Health Alliance Summit will be taking place on 8 & 9 October 2024. The Summit will bring together digital health thought leaders from across the region and will be anchored by partners of the NIIN Health Alliance. The Summit will provide an opportunity for participants to jointly identify new projects and collaborative initiatives to address digital health innovation and solutions.

Save the dates now! An EOI for attending the Summit will be going out in late July 2024.

Healthy Connections: Bringing the clinic to the community

The Curtin University team lead by Dr Susannah Soon (third from left in picture), developed an AI-enabled Mobile Medi-Kit virtual healthcare solution to overcome the challenges of long distances and lack of stable health workforce, to deliver reliable and integrated healthcare services to remote Indigenous communities in the Pilbara region in Western Australia (WA).

The team has included much thought into culturally sensitive, user-centric, user interfaces, including upgrading the external surface of Medi-Kit with community specific artwork. The Medi-Kit form factor is the Cisco Desktop Mini, with a small ruggedized case with edge computing, medical devices, satellite connection, cloud processing, and is fully solar powered.

The Medi-Kit is also integrated with existing WA Health models of care and health information systems, with strict adherence to data sovereignty and cyber security considerations.

Digital Upskilling of Healthcare Workforce

The healthcare sector lacks a digitally-ready workforce with the requisite digital skillsets and knowledge to leverage the benefits of digital technology. The skills gap manifests across the workforce, including clinical, operational, administrative and management roles.

A consortium led by NIIN Health Alliance partners of RMIT, Grampians Health, and Cisco, is looking to develop 5 Digital Skills for Health courses. The consortium will work to extend courses from Cisco Networking Academy and RMIT College of Vocational Education to address skills gap in digital health innovation and settings. 

Zero Trust in Healthcare

Managing an organisation’s security becomes more challenging as its digital footprint expands. This problem is compounded by the fact that:

• Workloads are moving from on-premise to cloud services
• The number and diversity of devices expands
• Health professionals working from different locations. 

Health organisations are grappling with how to manage security effectively (using resilient infrastructures) while also ensuring healthcare professionals can perform their clinical and non-clinical functions. Of particular focus is how to prevent cyber incidents impacting patient safety, patient and staff privacy, and more importantly, the ability to delivery health services.

Zero trust recognises that many of our engineering approaches to security have not scaled well to the types of complex and interconnected systems we use today, particularly in healthcare. It acknowledges a more holistic approach to cyber security protection, where the use of comprehensive security architecture is essential. Contemporary research by Flinders University seeks to address this problem by creating a translational framework for healthcare organisations to better understand and implement a zero-trust cyber security approach to protect their systems, data, and ultimately patient safety. As cyber security threats grow, this project will inform changes in the security posture of healthcare organisations.

Commercialisation and the MedTech Actuator

The MedTech Actuator was founded in 2018 by serial MedTech entrepreneurs and health policy experts who understood that medtech, healthtech and biotech ventures require a bespoke acceleration model.

Being Australia’s national deep healthtech commercialisation initiative, the MedTech Actuator now has offices and/or extensive activities across the Asia Pacific – in Singapore, Japan, India and beyond.  It connects the region’s broad ecosystem to empower founders to build the next wave of global health innovation success stories. As partner of the NIIN Health Alliance, discussions are well underway between the MedTech Actuator and the NIIN Health Alliance to formulate pathways to commercialisation of health innovations throughout the Alliance. 

Current NIIN Health Alliance Partners and Collaborators