How digitisation is shaping the future of Australia’s Education and Healthcare industries

By Jason Bamert, Associate Director of Education, Optus Enterprise 

In 2020, Cisco and Optus announced a partnership with La Trobe University and Curtin University to establish the National Industry Innovation Network (NIIN).

The NIIN serves as an important move for industry and academia to collaborate for Australia's acceleration of digital transformation and its long-term digital economic resilience.

The partnership has released its first research initiative, How Digital Collaboration is shaping the future of Education and Healthcare.

The Report focusses on the role of digital collaboration in the future of work, with attention to the education and healthcare industries. Both saw significant impact through the current pandemic and a rapid move towards remote working, teaching, learning, and care provision. 

COVID-19 has impacted the way we work, live and learn

The report highlights the shift towards adopting collaborative technology accelerated by COVID-19, as many organisations put in place the tools needed to enable remote collaboration.

Co-authored by Professor Mark Griffin from the Future of Work Institute at Curtin University and Professor Aniruddha Desai from the La Trobe University Centre for Technology Infusion, the researchers interviewed key industry, government and university stakeholders to better understand the key challenges and opportunities faced when working remotely.

The Report reveals that the transformation of work today is critical to individuals' resilience in their workplace and their consequent productivity. NIIN's research aims to clarify what is next and build on many organisations' digital collaboration foundation.

Three areas of the public sector have been profoundly impacted by the global pandemic – central government, education and healthcare.  

These sectors have responded by using digital collaboration tools to: 

• conduct government securely via virtual parliaments
• accelerate the shift to blended learning models
• develop new channels to engage and share information with students 
• enable telehealth for ambulatory and inpatient settings 
• re-imagine physical facility workflows.

And it’s not a temporary phenomenon, with studies showing that most of those who worked from home during COVID-19 wish to continue doing so. Hence, organisations are now focussed on what's next and how to further improve and enhance the collaboration experience.

Moving from a response to a recovery mindset  

Organisations are now moving from a response to a recovery mindset. The report has found that digitised collaboration will likely become vital in improving cross-department teaming and work agility. 

Digital collaboration will also enable the digitisation of services and more effective cross-agency collaboration reinforcing the view that secure collaboration technology will increasingly drive transformation in education and healthcare. 

In education, collaboration platforms will facilitate a future where learning is more accessible, and the walls around universities are more porous. 

In healthcare, collaboration platforms will facilitate a future where healthcare services are more customised, and there is greater scope for patient-provider interaction.

New technology innovations will accelerate future digitised collaboration

Advancements in collaboration technology are also enabling benefits beyond making team interaction possible across time and space. 

Collaboration technology innovation is expanding to include features as diverse as social networking, document collaboration, real-time transcription and captioning, and automation – all of which support more productive collaboration and teamwork. 

This innovation will unlock enhancements to live class streaming, Learning Management System integration, and live captions for hearing impaired in education. And in healthcare, an ability to enhance the capability to display room safety requirements, dictate patient actions plans and integrate into Electronic Management Record systems are integral to the interoperability of system workflows.

Many organisations now run multiple platforms for digital collaboration to provide users with choice. The report also highlighted the importance of interoperability between secure enterprise platforms, such as Webex and Microsoft Teams.

Design principles of collaboration and next steps

NIIN’s research identified imperatives for organisations when implementing collaboration platforms. Organisations need to clarify collaboration goals, manage change and customise platforms for individuals, teams and workflows. The technology itself needs to be scalable, resilient and secure. 

A few collaboration platforms – particularly those that are consumer-focused – have been exposed from a security perspective. Considering the potential risks of a data breach to reputation, trust, and sensitive data security has become critical to collaboration implementation.

This reinforces several discussions that Optus Enterprise has been having with the sector, distilled into a separate report here.

At Optus Enterprise, we are proud of the deep partnerships with a growing number of Australian universities. We look forward to playing our part in helping institutes understand the importance that digitisation and technology can play in navigating through some of the most acute challenges the sector has ever faced.