Beyond the Hype: Building Trustworthy AI for Healthcare

About This Event

Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming healthcare — from clinical decision support and medical language models to patient-facing digital companions.

This meetup brings together two experts working at the frontier of AI, language technology, and healthcare applications. Through perspectives spanning clinical natural language processing and speech-first healthcare interfaces, we will explore how AI systems are being applied in real-world health contexts and the challenges of building systems that are both useful and trustworthy.

Whether you're a data scientist, AI researcher, clinician, engineer, healthcare innovator, or student, this session will offer valuable insights into where healthcare AI is heading.

Speakers & Topics

Talk 1: Deep Understanding vs Deep Learning — What's Missing in Healthcare NLP?
Dr Jon Patrick — PhD, MSc, BSc, Dip Behave. Psych, Dip LSurv, FADIH, FACS | CEO, HLA Global LLC

Dr. Jon Patrick brings decades of experience in computational linguistics and clinical NLP. As the CEO of HLA Global LLC, he is a recognized expert in healthcare language processing and a Fellow of both the Australasian Institute of Digital Health and the Australian Computer Society.

The dominance of neural networks and large language models has reshaped natural language processing — but has the field's rush toward deep learning come at the expense of deeper language understanding?
This talk explores what computational linguistics brings to the table that purely statistical approaches often struggle to capture, particularly in high-stakes healthcare applications. Using illustrative examples of LLM-generated health content that can mislead by both omission and commission, Dr Jon argues that linguistically grounded approaches remain essential. In healthcare, where misunderstandings can have real consequences, deeper models of meaning aren't just an academic concern — they're a clinical safety imperative.

Talk 2: The Speech-First User Interface as an Enabler for Smart Automation and Patient Engagement
Dr Allen Nugent — BSc (Physics), PhD (Biomedical Engineering) | Founder & CEO, Virtual Nurse Pty Ltd

Dr Allen Nugent is a senior data scientist and health tech entrepreneur whose career has spanned artificial heart valves, supply chain optimisation, and big data healthcare informatics. For the past six years, he has been building the Virtual Nurse Companion — a speech-first digital companion for seniors that provides continuous in-home monitoring, medication management, and connection to family and community.

This talk introduces the concept of the speech-first user interface as an enabler for smart automation and patient engagement. Dr Nugent will explore areas where a virtual nursing solution can address real problems in health, aged care, and disability care — drawing on his own experience building and deploying the Virtual Nurse platform. As voice-driven AI becomes more capable, what does it take to design products that seniors will actually use, and that clinicians can trust?

Special Industry Update:

Data analytics & AI recruitment market insights from Heli Williamson, Managing Director, Krauss Partners

Who Should Attend?

This meetup is open to anyone with an interest in the intersection of AI, data science, and healthcare — including data analysts, data scientists, machine learning engineers, clinicians, health informaticians, researchers, product managers, and students.

We are grateful to Krauss Partners, Helpful Engines and UTS Startups for supporting this event and helping us create a space for the Sydney healthcare AI community to connect and share ideas.