Dr Steve Gallagher and Dr Tania Moerenhout are championing the importance of digital health.
With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and other technological advances, there’s never been a better time to focus on digital health.
Digital health is the use of digital technologies such as AI, telemedicine, wearable sensors and electronic health records to improve health care.
The University of Otago – Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka offered a programme in Health Informatics for many years. Otago’s current Digital Health programme started four years ago as a collaboration between the Dunedin School of Medicine (DSM) and the Department of Information Science, but is now run solely by DSM.
This latest programme continues to upskill health professionals and others to help meet the growing demand for specialists in digital health.
Course Director Dr Steve Gallagher, the School’s Co-Associate Dean Medical Education, says in this rapidly-changing world, advances in AI and other technologies have the potential to bring significant benefits for health practice and patient care.
“Good digital health systems and practices will allow practitioners to treat people more effectively and efficiently. Patients will be empowered to be more involved in their own care which will improve health outcomes,” he says.
Otago offers both an online postgraduate certificate and a diploma in digital health, designed for a wide range of working professionals, including doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers, and people in the IT sector.
Steve says one of the highlights of the programme is the return of previous graduates to deliver guest lectures, while a major strength is its ethics component, supported by the School’s long-established Bioethics Centre.
“Ethics is such an important part of digital health – everything discussed around AI at the moment is about ethics.”
Dr Tania Moerenhout, a GP and Senior Lecturer in the Bioethics Centre, leads the ethics component of the programme.
Tania says if digital health practices are not developed well, they become an obstacle rather than an advantage.
“Problems such as a lack of interoperability, of systems not being easily accessible for both healthcare professionals and patients, can make it harder to deliver care safely and effectively, so we need to turn that around.
“A first step in doing so is raising awareness of how digital health systems work, and making sure people are well-equipped to identify these issues and improve on them.”
Otago’s Digital Health programme can be undertaken as a full-time or part-time course. One of its advantages is that it includes live online lectures, mainly taught during the evening, so students can interact and discuss issues. These sessions are also recorded to ensure people can catch up if they miss a session.
As well as looking to attract course participants, Steve and Tania are keen to hear from academics and support staff across the University who are interested in digital health to see if there are further opportunities for collaboration.
“We hope to build this into a real growth area and expand the learning opportunities in digital health alongside other programmes,” Steve says.
- Kōrero by Andrea Jones, Team Leader, Divisional Communications
Otago’s Digital Health programme
Healthcare systems are increasingly dependent on data, technology and digital solutions, and consumers expect to use personalised digital technologies to enhance their own individual health and wellbeing. Future roles for healthcare professionals will include the provision and transformation of services using digital technology.
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