16/10/2022                                                                            
                                    
                                    
                                                                        
                                          Week 42: Dr Ann Shortt
"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that is has taken place" - George Bernard Shaw.
Dr Ann Shortt is an Emergency Medicine Consultant in Mayo University Hospital. She is Co-founder and Medical Director of Full Health Medical - a medical software company that automates workflow for medical assessments by replicating the doctor’s thought process when interpreting medical data.
She graduated from UCC in 2000 and went on to train in Emergency Medicine (EM) in Dublin, London and Australia before gaining her Fellowship in EM from the Royal College of Emergency Medicine in London. She has been passionate about EM right from the initial euphoria of airway management and chest drains in the earliest days of her career.
Having worked in Hospitals for many years Dr Shortt grew frustrated with the paper charts, fax machines, IT systems that don’t talk to each other and the duplication of work. She strongly believed that we needed to re-imagine patient journeys and to embrace scalable technology to overcome the bottleneck of staff shortages.
She is a passionate believer in empowering the patient, using machine learning to translate raw medical data into sensible balanced medical interpretation. She also believes that we need to take a hard critical look at the individual’s workload in the health service and ask what part of it is repetitive and could be automated. While the personal touch is a critical part of dealing with humans, there are many tasks that are mundane and repetitive and we are in the midst of a global healthcare staffing crisis. 
Full Health Medical grew from a copybook exercise in 2011 into an award-winning international company, now listed in the top 25 HSE Digital Health companies. The technology is used in a range of healthcare providers, from pharmacies to GPs, to hospitals across the UK and Ireland.
Dr Shortt lives on a farm in Mayo with her husband and two children. She plays piano and reignited her childhood passion for gymnastics a few years ago, joining an adult gymnastics class in Galway. Like every medic she is always trying to find the balance between family life and work and find time for a few handstands in between.