No exclusivity in Telstra partnership, says CSIRO

The new strategic agreement will allow the organisation to tailor its research and technologies to meet industry demands.

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The CSIRO’s strategic partnership with Telstra Health will help the organisation ground its research in industry and deliver digital health solutions that “fit the market”, according to Australian e-Health Research Centre CEO Dr David Hansen. 

Dr Hansen told TMR’s sister publication Health Services Daily that the new agreement would allow the CSIRO to tailor its research to meet the needs of digital health industry stakeholders more accurately, reducing the time taken to bring its research to market.  

“From a CSIRO point of view, we really want to accelerate the wider adoption of our research. We’re identifying with Telstra Health whether something we’re doing fits in with their product line, and hence we can slip it into their product development earlier,” Dr Hansen said. 

“The idea of the agreement is that we can bring our research strength to projects which Telstra Health are doing, or we can discuss how some of our research might complement Telstra Health products, and hence take them to market,” Dr Hansen said. 

“There’s other ways that Telstra Health and the CSIRO AEHRC may work together in terms of responding to market opportunities, or Telstra might come to us with a particular challenge they’re facing and talk to us about how our research might help them solve that.” 

According to Dr Hansen, there was no direct financial commitment attached to the agreement as it was strictly a strategic research partnership, nor would it prevent the CSIRO from pursuing market opportunities with other companies. 

“Most importantly, it is not exclusive, we’re not tied into only working with Telstra Health and Telstra Health aren’t tied into only working with us,” Dr Hansen said. 

“It’s not exclusive on multiple levels. For instance, when I mentioned about responding to market opportunities, there’s no exclusivity around that, we can have a discussion with Telstra or others. 

“We also have a fairly open approach with our technologies. A lot of our software is available open source, but that doesn’t mean we can’t work with companies such as Telstra Health in providing that as a commercial product or service. 

“We’re hoping, of course, it’ll lead to us doing lots more with Telstra Health, but there’s absolutely nothing in the agreement which stops us doing anything with anyone else.” 

According to Dr Hansen, workforce shortages were one of the biggest challenges for the digital health sector in Australia, with demand for universities to incorporate digital health education into medical school curriculum growing among health professionals nationwide.   

“Workforce is a really big issue for digital health at the moment, [and] I’d like to think there’s a solution for that, but there’s not a [single] solution,” Dr Hansen said. 

“The two or three things we really need to do is grow the digital health workforce beyond the current numbers we have, and that means attracting other digital professionals from other industries into health care. 

“The other way, of course, is to try and capture them young, I’d really love to see more universities incorporating digital health into their software engineering degrees and IT degrees and it’s the same in medicine. If you talk to a lot of health professionals, they’re keen to see more digital health in medical degrees as well. 

“We need to upskill not just the digital workforce, but of course, the health workforce as well in digital health.” 

Establishing data interoperability across the health system with FHIR accelerator program Sparked and managing the risks posed by AI were also significant obstacles for the sector to overcome, Dr Hansen said. 

“What’s happening in interoperability at the moment, the federal government’s got a real focus on that, and CSIRO is front and centre of that through the Sparked program along with the national clinical terminology service, so I recognise those are big challenges,” he told HSD. 

“There’s [also] technical challenges, workforce, and the growing ease of building AI algorithms, how do we ensure they’re being used safely, [that’s] going to be an increasing issue in the future.”