The man running one of the world’s most consequential health data platforms – the Mayo Platform – is speaking at the Wild Health summit in Canberra next month to set out, in concrete terms, how you can actually move a health system from sickness to wellness using AI and data.
There is a particular kind of policy embarrassment that Australian healthcare generates with impressive regularity.
A serious, government-commissioned review identifies a structural problem everyone already knows exists, proposes a sensible, costed solution, and then the review sits. The problem compounds. Someone talks about commissioning another review.
The Productivity Commission’s December 2025 report, Delivering Quality Care More Efficiently, is at serious risk of joining this canon.
The Commission is explicit: the costs of inaction are high, and better investment now can improve outcomes and alleviate increasing pressure on the care system and future budgets.
That report was handed to the Treasurer six months ago. You can probably guess what has happened since: no visible movement toward the report’s central recommendation: a National Prevention and Early Intervention Framework, led by Treasury, supported by an independent advisory board, built on linked data and modelling infrastructure, and coordinated across Commonwealth and state governments.
What has happened instead is the suggestion that the newly established Australian Centre for Disease Control has prevention somewhere on its long-term to-do list – as if an agency still finding its feet on communicable disease is the appropriate vehicle to deliver the most significant structural healthcare reform opportunity planners have seen in decades.
That opportunity is knocking hard at our door right now – it’s in getting our act together on AI, medical data, analytics and integrating it properly into our “sharing by default” plans – but no one is going to the door so far.
The demographic crash is close and real
Wild Health’s Prevention Pivot summit will open on 17 June with demographer and economist Simon Kuestenmacher laying out what Australia’s demographic trajectory actually means for the health system over the next decade – not as a policy abstraction but as a blunt numbers problem.
The aged care workforce shortfall. The chronic disease burden of a population that is living longer but not living healthier. The compound pressure on hospitals, mental health services and disability care as the system tries to absorb demand it hasn’t been designed to handle.
This is the context in which Dr John Halamka – president of the Mayo Clinic Platform and one of the most practically consequential figures in global health AI – will speak to the summit.
The sequencing is not accidental. Mr Kuestenmacher will show you what is coming. Dr Halamka will show you what a serious health system could do about it.
What Dr Halamka has been building
The Mayo Clinic Platform is not a concept or a think tank. It is a working global data platform that connects deidentified patient records from health systems across multiple countries, applies AI to find population-level signals, and generates the evidence base for prevention and early detection, at scale.
His central argument – made at Davos in January 2025, in peer-reviewed journals, in keynotes across the US, and now in Canberra – is one that should disturb anyone working in Australian health policy.
Ageing populations globally are accumulating more years of sickness than years of health. The clinician workforce will not grow fast enough to manage what is coming. The only mathematically coherent response is to use the patient data of the past to prevent the disease burden of the future.
As Dr Halamka puts it, to move from sickness to wellness.
Dr Halamka is not talking idea or theory. The Mayo Clinic’s Advanced Care at Home program is putting 60 patients a day through hospital-quality care without a bed.
The platform’s accelerator is producing companies building at-home cancer detection tests that deliver lab-grade diagnostics in 30 minutes, and AI tools that use wearable data to predict mental health crises before they occur.
The Coalition for Health AI – which Dr Halamka chairs – released its first major governance framework in September 2025, establishing responsible AI deployment standards now being applied across more than 22,000 accredited US health organisations.
None of this is a pilot. These are production systems generating evidence and changing outcomes already.
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The question no one in Canberra is prepared to say out loud
Now ask: what is the Australian equivalent to this direction and program?
We have My Health Record – a massive data asset that has cost more than a decade and two billions of dollars to build, but which remains largely unavailable for the kind of population-level AI-driven prevention research that Dr Halamka’s platform can do.
We have state-based prevention agencies doing genuinely good work in isolation from each other, without shared evaluation frameworks and without the data infrastructure to know whether what they’re doing is working at system level.
We have a federal government still primarily focused on getting FHIR interoperability right – important but now, in essence, years behind where the frontier of health AI already sits.
While we debate the installing a new, but now old water heater, the rest of the world is testing the taps hot and cold running data.
Department of Health, Disability and Ageing secretary Blair Comley has been refreshingly direct about why prevention proposals fail to get funded.
He wants the sector to find the overlap in his Venn diagram: what advocates believe on one side, what decision-makers believe on the other, and the salient points in the middle where things actually get done.
He is right that most prevention pitches are badly framed. He is also right, perhaps not quite in the way he means it, that the core problem is not the quality of ideas. It is the absence of a mechanism to receive them, evaluate them, coordinate them and scale them.
That mechanism – the Productivity Commission’s National Prevention and Early Intervention Framework, with its independent advisory board and Treasury-led coordination – is precisely what the sector has been circling for years.
But no one in Canberra appears ready to say its name out loud.
The Productivity Commission’s own Dr Alison Roberts will be on stage at this summit. Her report recommended the framework. Her report was immediately met with careful avoidance of the word “agency” by almost everyone in a position to act on it.
Who Is Moving While OUR Government Isn’t
One of the sharper sessions on Wednesday afternoon asks why private health insurers are pivoting so aggressively to prevention while the public sector watches.
The answer is not complicated: PHI companies have a direct financial incentive to keep their members well. They do not need to win a Venn diagram argument. They need to reduce claims.
Private Healthcare Australia’s Rachel David and HCF’s Professor Karen Price will be on that panel.
The Tuesday evening Great Debate adds another edge. The motion – that patients should be able to freely connect their My Health Record and clinical data to ChatGPT Health and Claude Health – is not really a debate about consumer AI. It is a debate about who controls information in a health system, and whether the existing structures can handle a patient who already knows more than the system expects.
That patient exists. The system was not designed for them. The question is how fast it needs to change to meet the patient properly in the middle of this revolution.
Why You Should Be in Canberra on 16 June
Dr Halamka, while always charming and polite, was not invited to speak to be polite.
He has been asked to describe what Mayo Clinic and its global partners have built, what it has found, and what it means for a country still debating the institutional infrastructure that would allow it to use its own data for its own population’s benefit.
The audience will include Trish Clancy, first assistant secretary for population health at the DoHDA. It will include the RACGP president, the CEO of Consumers Health Forum, the head of eHealth NSW, the AIHW and the CEO of Healthdirect.
The purpose of this summit is to try to make the cost of continued inaction on prevention, health data and AI visible, in internationally comparative terms, to the people in this country with the power to think, influence and act.
Australia has been, by global standards, a good health system.
But everyone knows we are now a classic slow boiling frog, trapped by how good our system has been, and afraid to jump out of the pot for fear of history.
We have not been keeping pace with what is now possible. It’s not anyone’s fault. This change is fast and seismic. It’s very hard to shift thinking on what have been well-laid plans, like “sharing by default”.
But we are now fiddling and someone (AI) just walked into the room with flame thrower.
The heat on the frog is about to increase to a point where we aren’t going to be able to jump out of our comfy pot at all if we don’t start acting.
Dr Halamka will be presenting some already working options for us to jump with.
Tickets and Program to Wild Health Canberra HERE. This is your 25% discount code: Extra25.
Tickets are limited and selling out.
