What we said at the Senate Inquiry Public Hearing

My name Dr. Nicole Avard, a general practitioner for over 20 years, a fellow of the Royal Australian College of GP. I am also the Medical Director of Metluma, a high-tech, high-touch solution for health care. I have helped thousands of women through their health journeys, including menopause. Every day, I see the impact it has on their physical and mental health, their workplaces, and their relationships.

I am passionate about finding solutions that place women at the centre of care, cultivate empowerment, and support a healthcare system under strain.

I’m here alongside Georgie Drury, my wonderful co-founder and tech enthusiast with two decades of experience in digital health.

Today, we advocate for menopause as a test case for a new model of care: the Smart Health Community, a concept coined by Deloitte.

1. Empowering proactive health and well-being management.
2. Fostering community building and wellness.
3. Enabling digital health tools and behavioural science.
4. Ensuring affordable health for all.
5. Making meaningful use of data analytics to improve outcomes.

After reviewing over 200 submissions, it’s clear that while increased doctor training and longer consultations have merit, they are in conflict with the reality of declining GP numbers, closing clinics, particularly in rural and remote areas, and a projected deficit of 11,000 GPs by 2030.

We are using menopause as our first test case to explore the feasibility of a Smart Health Community as part of the potential changes needed in the system.

New models of care need to be tested and options include exploring digital technology and a diversified workforce. Digital interventions can assist in increasing awareness, psychoeducation, cognitive behavioural therapy nudging, behavioural support, and remote symptom monitoring. Generative AI and large language models can be developed with a strong emphasis on safety and privacy.

Imagine healthcare as a pyramid, where GPs currently sit at the top, trying to manage all aspects of care, filtering down to allied health, awareness, education, prevention and behaviour change, with very little time to do it all.

Now, imagine inverting this pyramid where patients come informed, educated, and empowered about menopause. Supported by nurses, pharmacists, and other allied health professionals, they enter a symbiotic patient relationship with their doctor, already well-informed based on their needs.

We have tested a pilot of Smart Health with the wonderful support of the DHCRC and WSU and qualitative data revealed tangible improvements in self-efficacy, self-empowerment, and a sense of control over menopause.

More research is needed to optimize this model in terms of feasibility and accessibility and to develop highly engaging digital solutions.

Menopause serves as a gateway to chronic disease prevention with opportunities for counselling around cardiovascular risk, dementia prevention, and reducing bone fractures. Once again, digital interventions can play a crucial role here.

The path of innovation comes with highs and lows, celebrations and learnings. However, I firmly believe we sit on the precipice of an opportunity to walk this path together. Working collaboratively, we are committed to revolutionizing health care for menopause and beyond,

I Thank you for your time and attention and greatly appreciate the opportunity to share with you today. Let’s work together to make this vision a reality, I’ll now hand it over to my Co-founder Georgie Drury to further explore our vision for the future.

Thanks, Nic,

I describe myself as a bit of a tech geek in sneakers. To be clear, I am not a medical or allied health professional. I am here before you as an insanely curious person, an entrepreneur with a love for technology and data, and a belief that it will solve health problems at scale.

Back in 2013, as the founder and CEO of Springday, we were the first well-being platform in Australia to integrate with wearable tech. Over the next six years, we scaled to over 200,000 users across 13 countries. Fast forward to today, Springday is now owned by ASX-listed APM and I’m thrilled to be here with my co-founder Dr Nic, and I’m excited about the next horizon of health tech & femtech: smart health communities, large language models and artificial intelligence.

At Metluma, we are building this technology, starting with solving for peri-menopause and menopause. My team and I have scanned the 218 senate submissions and were excited to see:

• The largest theme: over 50% of submissions described access to healthcare services as a problem. Ie the need to access the right information and the right treatment without hugely impacting the person’s life.
• In our opinion, technology must play a part in this, yet strangely, 3.7% of responses identified the opportunity of digital tools to scale access and only 8% mentioned telehealth.
• Overwhelmingly we agree with the institutions and advocacy groups are wanting a new model of care. Even workplace training and doctor education can even be solved with technology.
• 10.1% mentioned the need for multidisciplinary teams 8.7% mentioned the need for self-empowerment

LLMs and smart health communities represent a huge shift in technology and can address all of the above. The major LLMs (ChatGPT / Gemini / Claude and those trained on available information on the internet) are not necessarily suitable for healthcare at this point. There are numerous stories of ‘facts’ and ‘advice’ scraped from satirical sites that currently make these tools too risky.

That said, the same algorithms when applied to medical journals, medical datasets, wearable datasets, medical imaging, and temporal medical data (i.e., known datasets that are safe and clinically informed) have proven to outperform the well-known LLMs, and do so safely. These models incorporate the ability to interpret time series data as well (wearable and clinical data), and this technology is available right now, validated by world-leading institutions like MIT.

At Metluma we will use this technology to augment the work of healthcare professionals ie doctors, nurses, and allied health and support self-management, changing the workforce and delivering on the promise of freeing up a highly strained and valued group of professionals. This technology can’t be ignored.

Safety, supervision, and informed clinical use of the right technologies, trained thoroughly on appropriate datasets, will deliver a safe and informed interpretation of complex data.

Understanding and addressing a complex technological landscape is crucial for harnessing the full potential of AI while mitigating its risks and ensuring it aligns with human values and societal goals.

This is an opportunity for Australia. I want to call out those who are on this journey with us, Accenture, DXC, Melbourne Health, Linfox, HCF, Zurich…. At the foundation of an ecosystem that enables us to develop the healthcare system of the future and scale it globally, creating jobs and solving health issues – let’s start with perimenopause and menopause!