Making standards make sense: a government creative campaign for the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing

A patient sees a GP in Sydney on Monday, a specialist in Newcastle on Wednesday, and the emergency department of a regional hospital on Saturday night. In 2026, none of those three systems can read each other’s records without manual handover.

A 2022 Australian Digital Health Agency consumer study found 81% of Australians expect their health information to follow them between providers. The same study found 34-43% of healthcare professionals don’t receive medications lists, medical histories, or discharge summaries from referring clinicians. The OECD’s 2023 health data review found 75% of global fax traffic was still medical.

Behind the gap is forty years of accumulated point-to-point integrations, vendor-specific data formats, and clinical workflows built around HL7 V2 messaging from the early 1990s. Replacing that architecture is what Commonwealth-funded reform under the National Healthcare Interoperability Plan 2023-2028 is for.

That gap is the case for FHIR standards. Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources, an international standard maintained by HL7, lets clinical software systems exchange patient data without bespoke integrations between every pair of systems, alongside SNOMED CT-AU for clinical terminology and LOINC for observation codes, it forms the structured backbone for how patient information moves between care settings. Adopting FHIR nationally is the foundation for connected care.

Every other digital health investment: My Health Record, eRequests, ePrescriptions, the Healthcare Identifiers Service, the Active Script List, the Strengthening Medicare Taskforce reforms, depends on it working.

The challenge is communicating that to the people who fund it. FHIR doesn’t open a hospital. It doesn’t cut a ribbon. It’s technical infrastructure that pays out across decades. Not budget cycles, departmental priorities, ministerial portfolios, or federal-state agreements. The Department of Health, Disability and Ageing‘s Digital Health Branch, specifically the Connectivity and Standards Section, needed a campaign that explained the why of FHIR to four audiences inside and around government: consumers, clinicians, industry, and government policy areas.

That campaign is Why Standards.

DoHAC funds Sparked, Australia’s FHIR Accelerator. Sparked is CSIRO-led, developed in partnership with HL7 Australia.  The brief Mude was given was about everything around the technical work: the explanation, the visual language, the deliverable suite that lets the Section explain FHIR across the department without re-explaining it from scratch every meeting.

The brief named the four audiences — consumer, clinician, industry, government — and the scope of the government creative campaign spanned video, animation, written content, design system, and presentation infrastructure. Government brand campaigns in Australia at this scale carry compliance requirements most commercial creative work doesn’t: accessibility, security review, style manual conformance, and procurement-grade documentation across every deliverable.

On 14 May 2025, the production set up at the Melbourne Convention & Exhibition Centre during the Digital Health Festival, the annual gathering of the Australian digital health industry. A boardroom on level 2, a film crew of three, ten piece-to-camera interviews back-to-back across the day, a makeup station at the back of the room, and 30 minutes per speaker.

The interviewees came from across the digital health ecosystem. From DoHAC: Penny Shakespeare, Deputy Secretary of the Health Resourcing Group and Digital Champion; Daniel McCabe, First Assistant Secretary of the Medicare Benefits and Digital Health Division. From the Australian Digital Health Agency: Ryan Mavin.

From the major vendors whose systems run Australian healthcare: Michael Strachan and Michele Blanshard of Magentus; Angela Ryan of Oracle Health; Farhoud Salimi of Telstra Health. From the peak clinical body: Rob Hosking of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners. From the industry trade press: Jeremy Knibbs of Medical Republic. And from independent technical leadership: Danielle Bancroft, Chief Technology Officer.

FHIR is technical infrastructure, but it exists to support human care. A direction flattened to either pure tech or pure clinical would have under-served one audience or the other; the warm-cool hybrid handled both registers in a single visual system, and the biomorphic geometry let the technical analogies illustrate without feeling sterile.

The animation language that followed worked across two complementary styles. Character-led, line-based illustration carried the human moments, patient stories, GP consultations, the journey of a referral through the system. Geometric modular abstraction carried the technical moments: the analogies (air traffic control), data flow diagrams, system architecture views. The two registers connect through the shared palette and gradient system, so an explainer can switch between humanised storytelling and technical abstraction without breaking the visual unity.

Government creative campaign work at this complexity sits in the territory between federal government communications and creative production. The deliverables aren’t finished when the launch hits. They have to survive ministerial briefings, land with audiences who don’t have an hour for technical detail, and stay usable across budget cycles, machinery-of-government reshuffles, and the natural turnover of departmental expertise. Why Standards was designed to do all three.