Two days at the digital health festival felt like a sprint into the future of health care.....

I left with a page of notes, a few startling realisations, and a clearer sense of where our profession sits within this landscape. Spoiler we have a body of work to undertake and a mind shift to make.

What I took away from the digital health event of the year.

On May 21-22, 2026 I joined approximately 8,000 clinicians, digital health technology gurus, innovators and experts, policy makers, and researchers all under one very large roof at the MCEC. All of these people are grappling with the same fundamental question:

How do we make digital health care actually work for patients, the people who care for them and health professionals?

Digital Health Festival MCEC May 2026

We are invisible in the data

The very first panel session I sat down in had some of the hardest landing messages. Bronwyn Morris-Donovan CEO of Allied Health Professional Australia said it plainly. Digital tools are not being designed with allied health in mind right now. We are adapting our workflows to fit systems built for some-one else and the data that we generate in allied health - which is rich, detailed and clinically meaningful is contained in silos, largely also disappearing in free text fields that nobody can aggregate or report on.

For Dermal Clinicians, as allied health professionals this hits very close to home. We have no standardised program that is tailored to suit how we work, how we assess patients, how we observe and measure their skin health, how we manage and monitor them over time. The programs we do adapt our workflows to don't collect our clinical data uniformly, and are also not mapped against coded data points that the broader health systems and infrastructure can interpret. In a world where evidence of clinical impact increasingly drives funding, workforce recognition and referral pathways being uncoded, is effectively uncounted.

That needs to change, and it starts with us having conversations about how we can get on the same page to standardise what we use and how, as well as, getting in at the ground floor to influence designing a future made for us.

AI is definitely coming - but patients do have terms

Of course, as with everywhere at the moment, there was lots of discussion across both days about AI entering our lives and clinical practice. What stood out to me the most wasn't the technology that was being used or the ways that it's being implemented, but the consumer research around it.

Australians are cautiously open to AI in healthcare, but with clear conditions. They want transparency about when Ai is involved, they want the clinician to review and most importantly be accountable for the output. They also have very real concerns about accuracy and how their data is used and stored.

80% of of people surveyed want their AI generated health summary reviewed by the treating clinician before it reaches them.

91% of people surveyed believe the clinician carries accountability not the technology for ensuring accuracy

As a profession that already navigates complex conversations about trust and clinical credibility, this feels like familiar territory. The lesson is straightforward. If we adopt AI tools we own what happens when we use it. The technology doesn't dilute our accountability it amplifies it.

The infrastructure is catching up

On an optimistic note the foundations of interoperability (making things work together) are genuinely being built now. The Digital Health Festival was the forum for the Australian Digital Health Agency to announce the newly released National Framework for Digital Health Standards. This is a significant step toward national consistency in how information is structured, shared and governed nationally. Alongside this a conformance framework sets out the software requirements for sharing information with My Health Record, which matters for any vendor or dermal practice that is considering integration.

For self governing allied health professions like ours there was a specific message around data governance education. Uplift is needed to understand how data is collected, who owns it, how its classified, and what responsibilities come with it. These are not abstract policy questions any more. They have direct implications on how we build and justify our clinical practice. We can only demonstrate the important work we do and the difference we make if we understand how data becomes evidence.

The technical standards that allow different health systems to talk to each other (FHIR) are gaining traction. From July 2026 your patients' pathology results and diagnostic imaging will be automatically available in My Health Record. The pieces are starting to connect. One speaker put it well: "In the future, we won't say digital health. We'll just say health."

What I'm taking back and how I'd like to start the conversation with you....

• We are data rich but currently feel like we are a bit like baby in the corner, but that gap is not inevitable.

• We need to get serious about data literacy and coded documentation so we can start speaking in a language the health system understands.

• The conversations is happening, we are already on the edges of it, so lets dive in.

Have thoughts, feelings, opinions or questions reach out. I'd love to keep the conversation going

Do you know what coded clinical data is and are you using it in your patient clinical records sytems?

• Yes
• No
• Not sure