Professor Keith McNeil returned to Queensland from the UK in 2017 to take on the newly created role of Chief Clinical Information Officer and Deputy Director-General, Clinical Excellence Queensland.
In his presentation at Showcase 2018, Keith highlighted how Queensland was in a very unique position in the world to bring together the power of data across a population of nearly five million people. “There is no one else in the world that’s done that. My role is to bring the whole piece together – bring the technology piece together, the implementation piece, the usability piece; so that we can generate that data, and that information and knowledge that can be used to better inform the system."
However, he also noted how difficult it was to efficiently – and ethically – extract the huge volume of data the health system produces and to turn it into something meaningful and useful.
"We need a big disruption in healthcare because of financial pressures, increasing demand, changes in the type and complexity of our patients – we can’t keep going the way we are going because it’s simply not sustainable. We’re adapted at the moment to treating people with single episodic-based care. What we need to do is move to a continuum of care that is not just based on acute hospitals, and we can do that with the power of information."