Successes and Failures in Telehealth 2016
The 2016 Successes and Failures in Telehealth Conference (SFT-16) was an outstanding success, held in conjunction with three similarly themed conferences in Auckland from 1-3 November. The SFT-16 conference, led by the University of Queensland’s Centre for Online Health (COH) and the Australasian Telehealth Society (ATHS) also served as the 7th Annual Meeting of the ATHS – with the Annual General Meeting held with members and interested parties on Wednesday 2 November, 2016. Combined with the HINZ, Global Telehealth and the NZ Nursing Informatics conferences, more than 1100 attended SkyCity, Auckland to hear more than 220 speakers from 14 countries. Keynote presentations, plenaries, panel discussions, concurrent sessions and poster presentations – covered the wide world of telemedicine, eHealth and informatics.
The SFT conference keynotes were very well received – and included Prof Chris Bladin (Victorian Stroke Telemedicine Program); Andrew Slater (National Telehealth Service); Prof Monrad Aas (Organisational challenges); Dr Ben Wheeler (Tele-diabetes); and Dr Ruth Large (the past and future of telehealth in NZ). A total of 100 abstracts were submitted and reviewed in the lead up to the SFT conference, with a very inspiring blend of academic research papers and clinical reports of telehealth, demonstrating the increasing uptake of telehealth in the health sector. The SFT conference delivered 78 oral presentations, 15 posters, and a panel discussion on that debatable topic of: “telehealth – are we there yet?
Videos of selected papers are available here .
Selected papers were also published in a special issue of the Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare. A copy of the SFT-16 conference proceedings is also available online – SFT-16 Conference Proceedings. We thank the SFT-16 conference organising committee for their efforts behind the scenes, our 35 international peer-reviewers, panel chairs and our exhibitors who supported the conference.
SFT-16 Best Paper Awards
Congratulations to the following people for winning awards in the SFT-16 Best Paper category, ranked according to originality, significance, technical quality, and relevance to the conference theme.
Anthony Deacon and Sisira Edirippulige: Design of an RCT to compare the effectiveness of smartphone and paper-based delivery of a mixed methods intervention for adolescents with type 1 diabetes
Tal Shany, Michael Hession, David Pryce, Mary Roberts, Jim Basilakis and Nigel Lovell: A small-scale randomised controlled trial of home telemonitoring in patients with severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
Richard Scott and Maurice Mars: How Do You ‘Scale’ Telehealth?
Centaine Snoswell, Jennifer Whitty and Louisa Gordon: Teledermoscopy for skin cancer in Australia: is it cost-effective?
Anthony Maeder and Danielle Elmasri: Alcohol Usage Intervention based on a Conversational Agent
Kim Knight: Telehealth applications for chronic disease recovery and practitioner CPD training
Michael Kalkoff, Nigel Armfield, Katherine Perry, Sarah Clarke, Sarah Pickery and Roy Davidson: Telemedicine for acute care and transfer decision making: preliminary experiences in Northland, New Zealand
Monica Taylor, Liam Caffery, Anthony Smith and Karen Lucas: Substitution rates of video consultations for traditional consultations at a tertiary public hospital
Useful links
Videos of selected presentations
JTT Special Issue: SFT-16 – selected papers