Reflections and Insights from the 2026 Digital Health Festival

Nicki Shirley
May 21
4 min read

I’ve just wrapped up two whirlwind days at the Digital Health Festival (DHF) here in Melbourne, and my head is buzzing. As a Kiwi looking across the ditch, I came here to see what trends are shaping the Australian healthcare landscape and, more importantly, how we can apply these insights back home in New Zealand.

The exhibition floor

The exhibition hall was a different universe from home. AI scribes, hospital-at-home platforms, continuous monitoring vendors, digital therapeutics - most with the kind of marketing budget you don’t see at a New Zealand stand. It’s easy to feel small walking through it. Brad from Orion Health made a good point that the complexity of our system in New Zealand is actually an advantage when it comes to building things that scale.

The highlight: Reimagining the next decade of care

My favourite presentation of the entire conference was "The next decade of care: reimagining Australia's digital health future," delivered by Dr. Amandeep Hansra, Chief Clinical Advisor at the Australian Digital Health Agency. Her insights into Australia’s digital health future resonated deeply with the challenges we face in Aotearoa.

She framed the whole talk around a patient she called Zara. Zara is not real, but she is every patient Amandeep has seen in twenty years of general practice. Amandeep told Zara’s story twice. The first version is the system we have today, and it is actually pretty good: Zara rings 1-800-Medicare instead of going to ED, the clinician on the line pulls up her My Health Record, she gets triaged to her GP, the GP uses an ambient scribe, a care plan is uploaded, a specialist is found. Australia, Amandeep reminded the room, is consistently ranked one of the top health systems in the world. The system is not broken. But it is built on episodic care. It still depends on Zara feeling unwell, ringing someone, turning up, being remembered. The fifteen minutes of care she gets sits inside 365 days a year of the rest of her life that we do not see.

After walking through some of the challenging forces the industry is facing, she then told Zara’s story again, this time set a few years out. Zara may not even have symptoms - the wearable picks up a signal, the AI flags it, her GP and care team get an alert only when it matters rather than a firehose of data, the system prioritises her appointment, the GP uses risk prediction and longitudinal data, a digital therapeutic is prescribed, automated nudges follow up on compliance, wearables alert the team to deterioration. The GP, crucially, is still the anchor. “AI is not replacing clinicians,” she said. “It is going to become the layer between data and decision. The human clinician stays where they belong - at the point of judgement, context and trust.”

Dr. Hansra hit the nail on the head: our current episodic care model is simply no longer fit for purpose. It was great session to paint a picture of where we could be heading in the near future and how we can move from episodic to a model of continuous care.

NZ's operational scrappiness and leadership

I was incredibly proud to see New Zealand so well represented, particularly in the session titled "Healthcare doesn't fail on strategy – it fails in operations: how NZ companies are working to make things better". New Zealand’s Minister for Mental Health, Matt Doocey, was crystal clear: we don’t need more strategies; we need accountability, clear targets, and execution.

The panel highlighted how New Zealand’s complex, resource-constrained environment makes it an incredible proving ground for health-tech. Because NZ has a zero-tolerance policy for technology that increases administrative burdens, Kiwi companies have built some highly resilient solutions. For example, Core Schedule's CEO discussed how their software addresses critical rostering failures that cost New Zealand over $1 billion due to misinterpretations of the Holidays Act. Meanwhile, Orion Health is doing incredible work pushing to unlock the 80% of healthcare data that is unstructured, paving the way for AI to enhance clinical decision-making.

AI infrastructure, governance, and the fragility of trust

A dominant theme across several other presentations, such as "AI is now critical infrastructure (but are we ready?)" and "Who has access to what? Who decided? Not IT!", was that AI is no longer a pilot project; it is now critical core infrastructure. But with this power comes a massive need for governance. MercyCare showcased how they implemented automated identity governance across their 2,000 staff. Their message was clear: if you don't know exactly who has access to your data, you cannot safely deploy AI models.

This tied perfectly into the "Consumer first: what healthcare can learn from digital-native CX leaders" presentation, which explored consumer trust. Unlike signing up for Netflix or PayPal, trust in healthcare is uniquely fragile and linked to physical safety. Healthcare usually starts with an implied trust that is easily eroded by fragmented care pathways and poor handoffs. Patients are demanding more transparency regarding how AI models use their data to make clinical decisions. We have to reduce the friction in the patient journey without treating patients like mere data points.

The push for preventative care

Finally, the keynote sessions rounded out with "Reinventing care: the transformation of prevention & early intervention". This presentation provided a sobering look at chronic disease management. Currently, Australia invests only 3.1% of its health expenditure in prevention. Dr. Travis Grant argued that an urgent $1.5 billion investment is needed to transform care models. By shifting from reactive care to proactive, AI-enabled health coaching and shared digital care plans, we could realistically reduce avoidable hospitalizations by 30%.

Final thoughts

Looking at these insights, the path forward for New Zealand is clear. We have the innovative tech companies and the operational scrappiness to lead the way globally. If we can combine our robust Kiwi solutions with strong AI governance and a shift towards continuous, preventative care, we can build a healthcare system that won't just survive the coming demographic shifts, but thrive.

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