Lionel King

Graduates and your families. I would also like to acknowledge the Gadigal and Guringai people of the Eora nation on whose ancestral lands we stand. Now, as the deputy chancellor has noted, we live in a world of challenges. The most cursory sweep of the news headlines or twitter feeds presents a dizzying and often depressing array of issues and concerns. But when I think about the challenges ahead a favourite cartoon comes to mind. It features a diminutive knight in a tiny suit of armour feebly brandishing a shield on his left arm and a sword on his right, he’s stranded on a tiny desert island in the middle of a vast unrelenting sea, and bearing down on him from each of the four quadrants are four giant fire breathing sea dragons. And the caption reads ‘I seem to be surrounded by insurmountable opportunity.’ Now I like this cartoon very much. I know it’s poking fun at the idea, but it also embodies an essential truth, which is, from great challenges come great opportunities.

So that will be the theme of my address today. I’d like to choose one area to illustrate this. I work for a medical device company, so I’d like to reflect on the future of healthcare. In many respects the provision of healthcare is a poster child for challenge. Although Australians by and large enjoy some of the best health outcomes in the world, we can see that the cost of providing these outcomes continue to grow, consistently outstripping GDP growth, and we struggle with the equitable distribution of health services and outcomes. For example, both our Indigenous and our rural communities have poorer access to healthcare, and lead shorter lives, with higher levels of illness. And our disabled community has disproportionately poor outcomes over and above conditions associated with their disability. As we look to the future these outcomes look even more problematic. There is a growing burden of chronic disease in Australia. Our obesity rates are among the highest in the world, leading to an increase in chronic conditions like heart disease and diabetes. And as we live longer there is a larger proportion of older Australians in the community with increasing demands for healthcare.

So you can easily see that both the equity of distribution of health outcomes and the cost of providing suitable healthcare are severely challenged. So is this an insurmountable opportunity? Well I’m talking today to a group of science and arts graduates who have been studying in the information age, and I firmly believe that we can look to disciplines which you may well have been studying and which certainly surround you, for solutions. I would like to quickly outline the capabilities beginning to be realised by the information revolution in digital health, which is just one of many emerging areas of opportunity. At this point in the information age we can see four forces entering the fray, maybe a little like my four seas dragons, but in this case definitely coming to the rescue.

These are: Connectivity. We live in a world where there are more mobile phones than people, and where more than half the people on the planet have access to the internet, around 90 percent of Australian households.  Digitisation. Everything is being digitised, from genomics, to senses, to the internet of things. Thirdly, big data. We now have the tools that allow us to aggregate, combine, and manipulate large and disparate datasets. Machine intelligence. We have learning algorithms that allow us to derive real personal insights from this multi-dimensional data. And these forces are converging, and are already giving digital healthcare solutions that promise to transform the way that healthcare is delivered. I’ll give you a few examples. Let’s look at telehealth. Here’s a real world case. In 2015 a private hospital chain in India launched a full virtual healthcare service. Via this service patients located anywhere in the world can interact with doctors via video and voice communication. Remote patients are receiving secondary and tertiary medical expertise previously restricted to city hospitals, including sophisticated medical services such as virtual tumour boards, which bring together doctors from different medical specialties to jointly advise cancer patients. They’ve even set up two telemedicine stations at an altitude of 14,000 feet in the Himalayas where locals normally have to travel up to 50km for primary care, and 25km for secondary care. And one of the hospital technology partners is supporting similar delivery of care to more than 40,000 indigenous people living in the Amazon region in Brazil. Another example, In Myanmar, a mobile health app for maternity care was launched in 2014, which happens to be the same year that telecommunication networks were established. This app already supports more than 1,500 telemedicine consultations a month. And you might note that these are developing world initiatives, think of the implications for our rural and Indigenous communities, as well as for healthcare delivery cost and capabilities.

Big data and machine learning are opening other opportunities. IBM tells us that healthcare data is growing at a rate of 48 per cent a year. Artificial intelligence engines such as IBM’s Watson health are using this aggregated data to propose new treatment options. Another cancer example:  in one US study Watson, in one third of cases, proposed potential transfer cancer treatment options the human expert board had not even considered. These new modes of delivery offer to shift the locus of healthcare increasingly from the hospital to the clinic to the home; and treatments to include not only your GP and specialist, but very possibly an algorithm as your first port of call to diagnose your condition and propose therapy. And all the while improving patient outcomes, bringing down the cost of healthcare delivery, and empowering patients and consumers to be more active in healthcare. We now talk about P4 medicine, which is predictive, personalised, preventive, and participative. I should say that these opportunities of course give rise to new challenges, for example, protecting data privacy, and effecting the behavioural changes required to adopt the new technologies and care pathways. How well we manage these will directly impact on the effectiveness we can hope to achieve. That said, when we look back at the challenges we’re facing, and look forward to the technologies and capabilities that are already in place or rapidly developing, I think we can see that the challenges look much less insurmountable, and indeed, much more like opportunities. And what we see in digital health translates to other advances in healthcare and across multiple other industries and sectors.

And the good news is that as you sit here today you have been very well prepared for the challenges and opportunities ahead, in whatever field you choose. Certainly by the families that have nurtured you, and the teachers and friends that have guided you, and most particularly on this occasion, by this university, and your achievement which we’re recognising today. I wish you all every success with the opportunities that lie ahead. Thank you.