Patient Zero x Digital Health Festival 2026: Sovereign AI and Secure Software for Australian Healthcare

Patient Zero was a proud sponsor of the Digital Health Festival 2026, which took over the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre for two days - May 20th to 21st - last week. 8,000+ leaders, 400+ speakers gathered across 11 theatres of content and massive trade floor to make DHF the largest gathering of healthcare innovators in the Asia-Pacific. This year, the conversation had shifted decisively from "is AI coming to healthcare?" to "how do we adopt it without surrendering control of the data, the clinical reasoning, or the regulatory posture the sector demands?" 

That was the question we came armed with answers to. Patient Zero is a 100% Australian-owned, ISO 27001-certified sovereign capability partner that builds secure software, AI, and integrations for mission-critical systems across Australian healthcare, government, and enterprise. 

Despite a name borrowed from zombie lore rather than clinical epidemiology, Patient Zero has spent years embedded in the most consequential corners of Australian health technology. We've partnered with the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), the Australian Digital Health Agency, Best Practice, and Genie Solutions on systems that millions of Australians rely on every day. Healthcare isn't a new vertical for us; it's been part of our DNA since inception. 

Verified on Federal (BuyICT) and State (QITC, eServices) panels, we believe Australian healthcare data deserves Australian-built infrastructure. That belief was the throughline for everything we brought to DHF this year. 

DHF brought together more than 8,000 senior leaders, clinicians, technologists, and innovators across hospitals, primary care, aged care, pharma, medtech, and government. With 11 theatres running simultaneously and 300+ exhibitors, it's the largest conversation about the future of Australian healthcare. The line between AI hype and durable, in-production change has never been thinner. 

We showed up to help define which side of that line teams land on. 

Wednesday 20 May, 9:00am, Apollo Theatre Paul Seymour & Bay McGovern 

Patient Zero Co-CEO Paul Seymour and Principal Product Owner Bay McGovern opened Day One with a keynote on how the economics of legacy modernisation have been rewritten in the last six months, and what that means in the context of Australian healthcare.

Drawing on three real-world stories — a regional bank unwinding a decades-old IBM mainframe, an ASX-listed company rebuilding its mobile estate before the App Store deadline cliff, and a regulated utility shrinking its SAP footprint back to just finance and payroll — they showed how agentic AI is collapsing the timelines and budgets that have stalled modernisation projects for two decades.

The talk traced the rapid evolution from copilot-style augmentation to agentic systems where hundreds of AI agents run in parallel and humans set direction rather than write code. It also tackled why most organisations are still on the sidelines: the bottleneck, Paul and Bay argued, is cultural rather than technical, and the people best suited to lead the transition are not always the most senior engineers.

For the Australian healthcare CIOs, clinical directors, and digital leads in the room, the takeaway was hard to ignore:

"Time and cost should no longer be the limiting factors on starting to look at replacing those legacy systems."

— Bay McGovern, Principal Product Owner, Patient Zero

We've published the full keynote write-up separately. If you want the long version with all three case studies, the open-weight-models argument, and the four-point takeaway, it's here: Notes From the Frontier: Modernising Legacy Systems with Agentic AI

Thursday 21 May, 11:30am Jacinta Streat
with Christine Kwong (Digital Health Advocate), Ariella Heffernan-Marks (CEO & Founder, Ovum AI), Tracey Johnson (CEO, Inala Primary Care), moderated by Mani Sahihi (CEO, Foxo)

If you don't know Jacinta yet, you should. She's Patient Zero's Principal Evangelist, our resident fanatic for continuous improvement culture. Jacinta has spent 20+ years delivering technology projects and leading agile teams across regulated industries like banking, insurance, and consulting. As AI reshapes software delivery, she's coaching our teams in the human skills the transition demands.

Jacinta brought a deliberate cross-industry view to the panel conversation. Approaches to co-design and community are universal product and delivery themes. Jacinta was able to share her practical perspective on how they've been managed outside the sector, what's transferable, what isn't, and what she would like to see more of in healthcare.

A few of the threads that emerged:

• Co-design isn't a workshop. It's an operating model. The patterns that move products from pilot to production work the same way in consumer fintech as they do in primary care. All of these projects require many people to work together — the ability to do so being an undervalued skill in the digital age.

• AI is the new layer on healthcare challenges. Whether it's Foxo's secure clinical communications, Ovum AI's work in women's health, Inala Primary Care's community-led care model, or Patient Zero's sovereign AI architecture work, the question is the same: how do we put AI inside healthcare systems in a way that's accountable, auditable, and genuinely useful?
  
  
• In terms of getting the most out of AI, the technology stack matters, but adoption is the bottleneck, and adoption is a human-systems problem. The teams that win are the ones building both technical and cultural capability at the same time.
  
  

"These days most solutions have some sort of technology element and let's face it, you can't really build technology projects, or any project, by yourself. You need other people around you. The skills you need in an AI-led world are really quite human. I think feedback and happiness makes the world go round and if you're empathetic to other people then hopefully we design solutions that will work for everyone."

— Jacinta Streat, Principal Evangelist, Patient Zero