Professor James Boyd is helping shape Australia’s digital health future by focusing on what actually works. In collaboration with Innovation Central Melbourne, he is developing technology that fits real clinical workflows, supports patients, and strengthens an overstretched health system.
Australia’s health system is under growing pressure. An ageing population, rising chronic disease, and increasing demand are forcing care beyond hospital walls and into the community. For Professor James Boyd, digital health is not about chasing the next new gadget, but responding to that reality in ways that genuinely benefit clinicians and patients.
Prof Boyd is the inaugural Chair of Digital Health at La Trobe University, a role he stepped into just before the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, digital health was gaining momentum, but it hadn’t yet become central to everyday care.
“La Trobe was probably one of the first universities to create a digital health space,” Prof Boyd says. “I was lucky enough to get the chair position for that. It was prior to the pandemic, so digital health wasn’t as big as it is now.”
COVID accelerated that shift almost overnight. With restrictions limiting face-to-face care, health services were forced to move quickly to virtual models – compressing years of change into months.
“It went from me developing some courses around digital health and slowly building a research profile to exploding when COVID hit,” Prof Boyd says. “So it’s been an exciting journey.”
Designing for real demand
More than 25 years working across health, data, and information systems has shaped Prof Boyd’s approach. His work sits at the intersection of technology and care delivery, with a clear focus on solving practical problems in a system under strain.
“A lot of what we’re trying to do is think about how we can improve healthcare from both the consumer and patient’s point of view, and from the clinician’s point of view,” he says.
The underlying challenge is capacity. As demand grows, more care needs to happen outside hospitals – without compromising quality or safety.
“A lot of the focus moves away from the hospital to thinking about how you look after people in the community,” Prof Boyd says. “Technology is a way of trying to bridge that gap and actually make things easier.”
But he is careful not to oversell digital solutions as a silver bullet. “It doesn’t work all the time,” Prof Boyd says. “But if we can supplement care and make things better, that’s what we’re trying to do.”
Those principles guide how collaboration in Innovation Central Melbourne assesses new ideas. Prof Boyd is wary of technologies that look promising but don’t survive contact with real clinical environments. “The worst thing you can do is try and impose technology onto the system,” he says. “If you start creating a new workflow, you’re just introducing new steps that are going to cause problems.”
Instead, he looks for tools that integrate smoothly into existing practice. “It has to be within the workflow that already exists,” Prof Boyd says. “Something easy to use, that doesn’t put people –– both consumers and healthcare professionals – off.”
From crisis response to system change
That philosophy underpinned one of Prof Boyd’s most influential projects: the Victorian Virtual Emergency Department (VVED). The idea emerged early in the pandemic, when emergency specialist Dr Loren Sher approached Prof Boyd with a simple question: could a virtual model help triage and treat patients remotely, easing pressure on physical emergency departments?
Within weeks, a small team, supported by La Trobe and Northern Health, had a virtual emergency room set up.
“In about four or five weeks we had something up and running,” Prof Boyd says. “Within about six weeks we had patients coming through.”
What began as a limited, after-hours service scaled rapidly. Today, the VVED operates 24/7 across Victoria, managing around 1,200 patients a day and supporting multiple clinical pathways, including paediatrics, residential aged care, diabetes, and geriatrics.
For Prof Boyd, its success came down to agility and a willingness to learn in real time.
“We weren’t getting hung up on what might not work,” he says. “We made it work, then kept improving it as we went.”
The same thinking continues to guide Prof Boyd’s broader work in digital health, focusing on technologies that fit existing care, respond to real demand, and can adapt as systems change.
As digital health matures, his focus remains steady: innovation that clinicians will use, patients will trust, and health services can sustain.
“We have to innovate,” Prof Boyd says. “But we also have to translate it.”
