Dr Olivia Metcalf1, Dr Kit Huckvale1
1The University of Melbourne, Carlton, Australia
Biography:
Dr Olivia Metcalf is a mid-career researcher who obtained her PhD in cognitive psychology from the Australian National University, and has a program of research in digital mental health. She is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Digital Transformation of Health, where she leads the Digital Health Validitron research platform, supporting researchers and clinicians from all areas of health and medical science with their exciting digital health ideas.
Dr Kit Huckvale is a Senior Research Fellow in Digital Health at the Centre for Digital Transformation of Health and leads The Validitron, the University of Melbourne’s healthtech studio. Kit is a trained medical doctor and informatician with a PhD in eHealth from Imperial College London. His research focusses on the design, quality and safety mobile of consumer-facing mobile health technologies such as smartphone apps and the development and evaluation of platforms to support research and innovation. He has worked with Microsoft Research Cambridge, Novartis and the UK Department of Health on translational projects including the evaluation of clinical decision support systems and computer vision systems for disease progression assessment.
Abstract:
Despite the tremendous potential of digital health technology to transform our healthcare system, most digital health tools developed today will result in sub-optimal uptake, unintended consequences, or failure, and evidence-based methods to support researchers to prevent such outcomes are still in their infancy. The University of Melbourne’s Digital Health Validitron, established in 2023, is an integrated research platform that combines expertise with physical and virtual infrastructure for the development, validation, and evaluation of digital health tools, with a specific focus on clinical simulation. The Validitron seeks to directly address common causes of failure, such as poor alignment with user needs and clinical workflows. Its interdisciplinary expertise includes co-design, clinical pathway transformation, digital readiness, usability testing, evaluation methodology, health technology assessment, legal and privacy considerations, and standards-based systems integration that researchers, clinicians, and industry from around Australia can access to support their projects.
Here, we present learnings and challenges from the first two years of operation. To date, the Validitron has fielded 298 enquiries for research support, and supported the submission of more than $130 million in research grants focused on developing, validating, and evaluating novel digital health tools in all areas of health and medical research. While there is significant demand for digital health research support, the novelty and interdisciplinarity of the digital health field means that there are frequently problems of both solution-system fit and misalignment amongst collaborators on a given digital health project. We will discuss how our novel research platform helps enable solution-system fit and collaborator misalignment.