In Conversation with Dr Catherine Jones

An Inaugural Winner of the 2021 Brilliant Women in Digital Health Award

Dr Catherine Jones, clinical radiologist and and College member, was recently recognised in the 2021 Brilliant Women in Digital Health awards for her outstanding contribution to the transformative development of clinically excellent diagnostic imaging technology.

Dr Jones is one of the 25 women recognised with this prestigious award presented by Telstra Health. 140 strong nominations competed for this coveted award during a six week nomination period from June to July 2021, covering a range of areas, including mentoring, medical research and technology development to improve health outcomes.

Radiology has a much greater opportunity than most other parts of health care to be at the forefront of digital innovation, and to create equitable access to quality, evidence-based health care globally,

In its inaugural year, the 2021 Brilliant Women in Digital Health award initiative by Telstra Health set out to recognise and celebrate women in digital health for their outstanding achievements, while raising awareness about the opportunities in the sector and inspiring others to follow their lead.

We had the privilege to interview Dr Jones who happily shared her stories and experiences.

Why do you think radiology has a much greater opportunity than most other parts of health care to be at the forefront of digital innovation?

While many other medical practices still rely on analogue systems to record data, radiology can be completely digital, and the core of a radiologist’s job can be completely done on a digital basis. As radiologists we look at digital images and are able to build huge datasets, which will help us draw insights and inform the decision-making for diagnosis and treatment.

Digital technology can play a pivotal role in every part of a patient journey by improving patient experience and incorporating findings into the medical results. In this sense, radiologists are well-placed to take advantage of digital innovations to improve patient experience and increase access to quality health care. Digital innovation is important. There is a lot of amazing work done in the digital health area. There are many ways for our profession to get involved to explore the unknown and seek opportunities to develop technology that can be applied to our clinical specialty.

This award came around International Women’s Day 2022. As one of the 25 recipients, what does this award mean to you? Would you like to say a few words to medical students and radiology trainees?

I’m honoured to receive this award. It sets out to recognise the contribution and hard work of females in the digital health sector. With this award, I’m hoping to raise awareness of the vast opportunities in this sector where women can take a lead to make a difference.

There is a well-recognised gender imbalance across digital health. There is also a lot of clinical expertise among radiologists, but when you look at how many radiologists are involved in digital health and artificial intelligence development, those who are involved in this field are predominantly male.

The 2021 Brilliant Women in Digital Health Award has come into being to recognise, acknowledge, and hopefully, start to help address this gender imbalance in digital health at a global level, not only across Australia and New Zealand.

Many women who work in the digital health sector come from a clinical background and have made a tremendous contribution. They often feel their role is dependent on their clinical expertise whereas men in this sector often come from non-health backgrounds, bringing their digital perspective and skills.

However, I’d like to say irrespective of your gender, your age, your social situation, full-time or part-time work, as long as you have enthusiasm for embracing innovation, you can make a contribution. If you have clinical knowledge which is required to make any innovations as successful implementation into existing workflows and practices, you do have a valuable contribution to make.

You are certainly very happy and proud, and what does it mean for the radiology profession in your opinion?

Radiology is vital to medical diagnosis and treatment and it contributes to almost every patient who comes to the door in one way or another. However, it is an overlooked profession because very often radiologists are not seen as a primary healthcare provider. For example, surgeons and GPs tend to be bigger in number as medical professions and they interact with a large number of patients directly, which contributes to a perception that patients are being looked after by these professions.

We are affected by the innovations and research being done in the medical specialties around us in the healthcare system, but we’re so busy doing our own job that fewer of us have the capacity to lead our own innovation as a specialty group.

It’s important to have a point of contact such as a clinical lead for innovations in digital health, making sure we’re included as a specialty when it comes to the decisions made by the hospital and the healthcare system at the federal and state government level.

It’s imperative for College members to be aware of the opportunities to contribute to build a sound healthcare system, not only through their workplaces but also through the College work to get involved in digital health innovations. In other words, we need to have our say as radiologists in a discussion. The College has interest groups and a wide range of projects for this purpose. We have a lot of valuable insights and expertise from our specialty practices to contribute in a very meaningful way to a wider discussion about digital health in Australia and New Zealand.

What is the milestone in your career path as a radiologist? What are you proud of from your contribution to digital health?

I'm very proud that I’m the clinical lead of the chest imaging artificial intelligence tool development at annalise.ai. In this role, I am responsible for the clinical aspects of design, development, validation and implementation of our chest imaging products. It is now approved for use across Australia, Europe, and just today, it received FDA approval in the US. This is an exciting milestone of this work as well as in my career journey.

What I’m proud of is that I’m helping tackle a known problem of imperfect human performance and investigating how artificial intelligence can be used by radiologists to improve their performance. We then follow up with the research and validation on the improved patient outcomes in the real clinical setting when the product is being used.

Developing an AI algorithm is not intrinsically difficult, but the difficult thing is to produce a clinically useful AI product that will ultimately lead to improved patient outcomes.

It’s a huge, complex undertaking that requires multidisciplinary collaboration in a highly disciplined, ethical approach among researchers, various medical specialists, software engineers and data scientists. It’s taken about two and half years to come to where we are: now the product has been used widely in Australia and around the world. About one fifth of all the chest X-rays across Australia are done with it.

It’s been a monumental effort by many people who are highly skilled in their contribution along the way. I consider myself very lucky to be part of this technology breakthrough in clinical radiology, and it is an absolutely a rewarding experience.

However, I’d like to say irrespective of your gender, your age, your social situation, fulltime or part-time work, as long as you have enthusiasm for embracing innovation, you can make a contribution. If you have clinical knowledge which is required to make any innovations as successful implementation into existing workflows and practices, you do have a valuable contribution to make.

What work have you done or are you doing with the College?

I’ve been on the Professional Practice Committee of the College for three years. It incorporates learning opportunities and platforms, policy guidelines, different undertakings by special interest groups, and CPD programs. It’s a wide-ranging list of responsibilities that the Committee is looking after.

It’s been a very rewarding experience for me to be part of the committee. It has given me an opportunity to understand what has been affecting our specialty as a medical discipline in Australia and New Zealand. I also appreciate the opportunity to be involved in innovation projects in the College, including developing new learning platforms and providing inputs in policies and position statement on a range of topic areas, for example, the lung screening program, artificial intelligence, machine learning and digital footprints.

It is important that our specialty is appropriately represented across Australian and New Zealand health care. I’d like to encourage clinicians to be aware of the opportunities to have their says and to become more involved in these great projects.

You must be a very busy woman as a radiologist with your clinical work, corporate responsibilities, and involvement in the College work and projects, as well as other commitments. Can you describe how you manage your time?

(Laugh) I’m generally quite busy. As a clinical radiologist, I spent two days a week developing artificial intelligence products with annalise.ai, three days doing corporate governance work with I-Med and some clinical management work in Queensland and Northern Territory. On top of that, I have commitments to the College on some work as mentioned before as well as some research activities.

I’ve got some news that I’ve been recently appointed as professor in the School of Health and Science at the University of Sydney. It is a research and education role for a program that delivers radiology education via online digital means. The task is to develop a research framework to identify the most effective way of delivering radiology education to different people from medical students to practising doctors.

Can you briefly outline your education and career path?

I went to university and initially studied mathematics and physics, with a double major in statistics. Then I studied medicine at the University of Queensland as a postgraduate. After my intern year, I decided to see the world and moved to the UK where I received some surgical training and started my training in radiology.

I was lucky enough to receive a fellowship opportunity to do cardiothoracic imaging in Vancouver. After having been away for more than a decade, I decided that it was probably time to move back to Australia.

Here I am, born in Brisbane and now back to live here as well, I had a bit a detour around the world. Now I have two children. They think I’m the best doctor in the world. They are a bit biased and unaware of the reality (Catherine is smiling).

Let’s talk about something that’s not work-related. What do you like to do in your spare time?

I love doing karate. Over the past three or four years I’ve been doing a mix of kickboxing and karate. I also enjoy craft, and I do a lot of knitting and weaving. It slows me down and is meditative and relaxing. It’s not outcome driven.

Especially, I enjoy doing karate with my kids. I love watching them learn new skills. They also love ice skating. I found out the hard way in Canada that learning ice skating as an adult wasn’t easy, so I’m happy to see them learning it at a young age.