How evidence over good intentions built better decisions and workforce capability

Kate Renzenbrink"My role is to make digital health work in reality, from idea and conversation through to action and new systems of care. The things that I've learned have actually just kept building. It's changed the way I approach work."

Kate Renzenbrink
Chief Clinical Informatics Officer, The Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital
Learner in the Centre's Learning Health Systems short course

  • Who: Kate Renzenbrink, Chief Clinical Informatics Officer at The Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital, brings clinical nursing expertise and digital health leadership experience to her role improving patient and staff experience through better systems and workflows.
  • The challenge: As an experienced clinician in digital leadership, Kate understood what needed to change, but wanted formal frameworks to design and evaluate digital systems rigorously.
  • Standout moment: A session on human-centred design and medical error in the Learning Health Systems course fundamentally shifted Kate’s approach – demonstrating that system design directly impacts clinical outcomes.
  • Key outcomes: 
    • Adoption of evidence-based decision-making in digital health
    • Removal of ineffective system interventions (e.g. alerts)
    • Development of workforce capability pathways in digital health
Motivating question: What does it actually take to turn clinical insight into real, lasting change?

Kate's journey into digital health began with frustration, but not her own. Working in gynaeoncology as a Clinical Nurse Specialist and Clinic Coordinator and as a Consumer Liaison Officer at a major specialist hospital, she was struck that patient complaints were about information access, not rude staff or poor bedside manner.

Patients wanted access to their own data. They wanted to understand what was happening in their care. And the systems in place – paper-based transfers, delayed discharge summaries, fragmented records – made that impossible and less safe.

For Kate, the answer was clear: "I was like, the only way we can do this is digital."

But knowing what needed to change wasn't the same as knowing how to make it happen. She had clinical credibility and understood the problems. But she lacked a structured, evidence-based framework for designing and evaluating digital solutions.

The shift: understanding systems and human-centered design

Kate enrolled in the Centre for Digital Transformation of Health's Learning Health System short course seeking to fill that gap. What she gained was more than knowledge, it was a new way of thinking.

"The biggest idea that I got from that course is the underlying, foundational understanding of what a system is, and how organisations work."

The most impactful moment came during a session on user interface design and medical error.

A speaker explored how medical errors relate to system design, specifically, how the way we design alerts and notifications affects whether clinicians notice them, understand them, and act on them.

It taught me about principles of user interface design and user experience principles, and I have not stopped with that. That was life-changing.

Kate realised that the design of digital systems directly influences clinician behaviour and patient outcomes. It's about designing how people interact with that technology – understanding that design has to be grounded in evidence about how humans actually make decisions.

Real-world application and impact

The course became what Kate calls "an incubator" – not just a place to learn concepts, but a place where ideas kept building on each other and fundamentally changed how she approached work. This includes:

This helped her understand:

  • Why digital initiatives might succeed or fail, and where friction occurs in implementation
  • Leading with evidence-based decision-making, including stopping ineffective interventions
  • Improving clinician interaction with digital systems through user-centered design
  • Building workforce capability and creating pathways for clinicians to engage in digital health
  • Embedding systems thinking into practice, supporting a shift from linear to systems-based work

This immediately translated into practice.

We've made a decision in the last few weeks to turn off an alert, because it didn't have the outcome that we'd hoped. There's no point holding on to things that aren't working.

"My role is to make digital health work in reality, from idea and conversation through to action and new systems of care. It's not about putting systems in – it's actually navigating the people part of a system."

“We’ve also created a Project Lead role for a staff member with a background in UI/UX, possibly the first time in a public hospital that we have this formalized expertise on our digital health team sitting with our change lead and our clinical analysts”.

Why it matters

Kate’s journey highlights a system-wide issue where many clinicians know what needs to change but lack the frameworks to design change effectively.

The Centre for Digital Transformation of Health’s education programs address this gap, equipping clinicians and health leaders with the capability to design, evaluate, and implement digital health solutions grounded in evidence and systems thinking.

If you are leading or contributing to digital transformation in healthcare, the Centre's programs provide the practical frameworks and capability to move from insight to implementation, with confidence and evidence.

Explore our courses to build the capability you need to lead digital health transformation with confidence and evidence.

Next course starts 22 July 2026. Learn more and register now →