That’s the question posed at the AIDH’s Primary Care Digital Connected conference.
Dr Janice Tan, a member of the RACGP’s expert committee on practice technology and management, told a digital health conference in Sydney today that software vendors often push efficiencies when they’re promoting digital tools to doctors.
“You can see more patients, you can get more money for your practice, and you can hit your KPIs and what-not. But really, digital uplift is not about efficiency. It’s more so about equity,” she told the Australasian Institute of Digital Health’s Primary Care Digitally Connected conference in Sydney today.
She said doctors who were not digitally enabled and trained to understand the capabilities of digital health, were going to be delivering different types of care to their population.
“I’m not saying they’re delivering a lower level of care, but they’re not enabled to provide the care to the best of their abilities,” she said.
As an example, she said a person who was using a paper medical record might not be able to access the notes from the multidisciplinary care team or practice nurses as efficiently as someone using digital tools.
Dr Amandeep Hansra, chief clinical advisor to the Australian Digital Health Agency, said that could also apply when AI scribes were being promoted.
Rather than talking about using AI scribes to increase the number of patients a doctor could see, vendors should talk to doctors about how they could improve the experience of being at work.
“Being able to go home on time, and being able to have good notes to look at,” she said.
But the big question was how to educate clinicians, particularly those with lower digital literacy.
Tim Blake from Semantic Consulting presented data on the huge variety of digital maturity across the primary care spectrum.
In his digital maturity assessment, he found there was a significant gap between advanced and foundational practices.
What was most interesting was that Semantic Consulting measured the practices twice over a 2.5-year period. In that time, while the digitally advanced practices improved their digital health scores over 12.5%, the foundational practices only improved around 2.1%.
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“Our current approach to digital transformation in general practice, and I suspect this can be generalised to the whole of health, is that we are making the rich richer and the poor are getting left behind,” he said.
“And if it was that bad, that would be bad, but that then impacts patients. So we need to do something about this,” he continued.
He said it was great to have good resources, “but the expectation the general practices would know what they need and have the time to find it, is a false assumption,” he said.
According to Tim McDougall, from Amplar Health,practices needed to be given educational opportunities at the level they’re at.
“All of our training and education is one-size-fits-all. The quickest way to get people de-engaged is that the first thing they hear [is] they don’t understand. That’s it, they’re off. So I think the idea of being very careful about what our audience is, is critical,” he said.
Dr Tan highlighted that peer-to-peer learning could be successful in change management.
“I found that what really spoke to the clinicians was peer-to-peer, clinician championing, but also showing and not just telling,” she said.
“So not just saying ‘this product or doing digital health will lead to better patient care’. Show them how to do it.
“When I reflect on my own experience as well, I only started using My Health Record because I realised I could get discharge summaries from the hospital from it. Someone showed me how to do that, and now I’m probably the number one proponent of My Health Record in my practice,” she said.
The panellists said digital health training should be across the entire lifecycle of a clinician.
Denise Lyons, president of the Australian Primary Care Nurses Association, said one way this could be integrated was through CPD.
“If some of that CPD were to be dedicated to upskilling around digital health, whatever that can be in your particular environment, I think that would help with the motivation towards compliance,” she said.
As Dr Rik Dawson, president of the Australian Physiotherapy Association concluded, championing digital health required a cultural shift across all health organisations, “were people are encouraged to take time out to think of things differently, instead of just meeting the needs of their patients, who are going to be there tomorrow and next week”.
The AIDH Digital Primary Care Conference was held on 21 October 2025 at Amora Hotel Jamison Sydney.
