1 April 2007 - CHI Team hits the lawn
CHI staff and students spent a lovely afternoon at the Clovelly Lawn Bowling Club to celebrate the end of the grant writing season. A truly magnificent view to the sea and perfect weather conditions made this social event fun for everyone, and the multi-national CHI team got a
chance to learn about the peculiarities of this traditional Australian leisure activity. Of course everyone knew who's team was going to win from the start ..
24 January 2008 - $1 million dollar grant to create 'Facebook' for better health
Researchers at the Centre for Health Informatics are working to combine internet search technology and social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace to improve our health.
Supported by a $1 million grant from
HCF Foundation, it is hoped that within 12 months Australians will have access to a high-precision online search technology tailored specifically to their health needs.
Currently, any online search through the popular search engines brings up predominantly American research.
“This will be like a Google search engine – but with a twist,” says the lead researcher on the project, Professor Enrico Coiera from UNSW’s Centre for Health Informatics (CHI).
28 November 2007 - Annie Lau's Thesis - The impact of cognitive biases on information searching and decision making
We are very proud to announce that Annie Lau has successfully completed her Doctoral program, and will graduate with a PhD later this year.
Annie's thesis describes ground-breaking work which explores the way people use search engines to make decisions about their health. Her specific focus has been on demonstrating how well known cognitive biases distort the way people read information they find, and as a result distort the decisions they make. Annie's work has also successfully shown how we can 'de-bias' decisions with clever new interfaces for search engines. She also explored how 'social computing' can be used to assist consumers when they make decisions using search engines.
Annie's thesis can be found at online courtesy of the Australian Digital Theses program. Annie's papers have appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, this year's World Congress (Medinfo) , and several more are in the pipeline. Annie's papers can be found in the
publications section of this site .
11 October 2007 - Short Courses in Health Informatics
CHI is starting with a series of Short Courses in Heath Informatics. The first course with the topic:
Clinical Decision Making will be held
23 and 24 November, 2007. The course will
provide an overview of the field of decision making in healthcare and introduce current ‘hot’ clinical decision support systems research topics through presentations and demonstrations. More information is available on the
Summer School page.
10 July 2007 - MEDICON 2007 IFMBE Young Investigator Award
We are pleased to announce that Sata Busayarat, one of our PhD students working with Dr Tatjana Zrimec, has won the IFMBE (International Federation for Medical and Biological Engineering) Young Investigator competition at MEDICON 2007 from a field of 12 finalists. Sata's presentation was titled "Lung Surface Classification on High-Resolution CT using Machine Learning". The finalists were selected based on votes from individual members of the international jury, and further evaluated by the YIA awards committee during their presentation at MEDICON 2007.
The MEDICON conferences are international events of high scientific standards with long lasting traditions held every third year in one of the Mediterranean countries under the auspices of the International Federation for Medical and Biological Engineering.
10 April 2007 - Four PhD scholarship available at Centre for Health Informatics in 2007
The Centre for Health Informatics is please to announce four PhD scholarships in 2007. The candidates will conduct research studies in areas of communicable diseases informatics, modeling communications in health organizations, designing new communication systems, or biomedical knowledge discovery. For more information, please refers to the
scholarship page
6 December 2006 - Birth of a new informatics research group as CHI farewells Jo Westbrook and her team
After six years at CHI , we bid a farewell to Professor Johanna Westbrook, who is taking up a new Chair at the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Sydney. She will be joined by Andrew Georgiou, and her two PhD students Mandy Ampt and Nerida Creswick, who move across to form the core of a new Health Informatics Research & Evaluation Unit. Jo has made a tremendous contribution to the success of CHI over the years, and her new Chair is a tremendous achievement. We wish her and the team every success. Both groups will continue to actively collaborate on our current joint projects, and future collaborations are also in the pipeline. The birth of a new health informatics research group in Australia bodes well for the discipline, and can only strengthen our national research capacity.
Well done!
14 Nov 2006 - CHI to host Information Technology in Health Care (ITHC2007)
CHI is proud to be the sponsoring organisation for the Third International Conference Information Technology in Health Care (ITHC2007): Socio-technical approaches to be held on 28-30 August 2007 at the Carlton Crest Hotel Sydney, Australia. The conference is a satellite conference of the International Congress of Health Informatics (Medinfo) to be held in Brisbane three days earlier, and follows on from a very successful second conference in 2005 held in Portland, Oregon, USA.
Details about the conference, paper submission, registration, and local information are available at
ITHC website
27 Oct 2006 - Andrew Georgiou won the "Most productive award" at SPHCM's Research Student Conference
Andrew Georgiou, a PhD candidate and a senior researcher at Centre for Health Informatics, won the special prize for his extraordinary achievement with most number of publications in prestigious peer-reviewed journals, book chapters, and conference papers this year. Congratulations Andrew!
17 Sep 2006 - Quick Clinical Wins First INTEL Don Walker Award for Quality
The first Intel Don Walker Award for Quality was awarded to QuickClinical project which provides rapid retrieval of health information that "can make a difference to the healthcare path".
"We've all know what it's like when we know we've seen something yet cannot find it when we need it. For GP's dealing with an ever increasing amount of available scholarly and medical data - the challenge of scouring the relevant medical journals and databases can be the equivalent to finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. This work exemplifies the objectives of this award mainly the prevention of unnecessary hospital admissions and the avoidance of medical errors, the reduction of waiting times and the general improvement of health outcomes."
"Doctors fail to find the information they need because they are unsure what is available, where to look for it, have very limited time available to conduct searches, and when they do search they have poor query formulation skills and often abandon searches because of time pressure. Often the evidence needed is scattered across heterogeneous data sources, each with their own unique query and indexing methods that creates further barriers."
The Quick Clinical (QC) is a revolutionary evidence-access technology designed to fill the gap between medical knowledge and clinical practice. It uses intelligent search filter technology to ensure the most relevant information are retrieved. The impact of this technology means clinicians are more likely to search and more likely to find relevant information in patient care.
Recently, QC achieved an increasing interest in the commercial world, including one online publisher and one large pharmaceutical organisations.
25 August 2006 - CHI wins two new ARC research grants
Two new research programs have been funded by the Australian Research Council, announced today worth approximately $960,000.
The first grant, a Linkage partnership with the Price of Wales Hospital, a teaching hospital of UNSW, will focus on developing new communication support systems for clinicians, and see the creation of an experimental ward where we can study the impact of technologies on clinicians. The $427,726 3- year ARC grant will be supplemented by an additional $300,000 in funds from our partner. The second 3 year grant, a Discovery Project, is lead by Dr Farah Magrabi, and will focus on Engineering safe decision support systems for healthcare, and is worth $240,000