August 2009: Informal Launch of the Australian Institute of Health Innovation
On Wednesday 26th August 2009 Professors Jeffrey Braithwaite, Enrico Coiera and Ken Hillman held the successful UNSW Launch of the Australian Institute of Health Innovation (AIHI). AIHI was established in late 2007 within the Faculty of Medicine, and recently occupied its purpose built premises on level 1 of the AGSM Building. The AIHI brings together three successful UNSW research Centres working in the separate but related areas of clinical governance, health informatics and clinical practice and health services research. The Centres are the:
- Centre for Clinical Governance Research in Health;
- Centre for Health Informatics
- Simpson Centre for Health Services Research.
To view Professor Clifford Hughes' talk please
click here.
April 2009: Can the market make healthcare safer?
In the 2009 April edition of the BMJ Group's Journal of Quality and Safety in Healthcare, Enrico Coiera and Jeffrey Briathwaite
propose using markets to improve patient safety. Inspired by emissions-trading schemes like Kyoto, the paper proposes setting safety targets for organisations, and a cap and trade scheme to help set a price for the permits that are generated when organisations beat target and have some to sell, or miss target and need to cover a shortfall. Putting a price on safety, and reflecting it in the bottom line of organsiations might be the best way to drive the system to acceptable levels of adverse events.
The
paper is freely available and the journal devotes an editorial and three critical commentaries of the idea.
Professor Coiera can be heard
explaining the idea on ABC National's Life Matters program.
An
opinion piece on the reasons for cap and trade in patient safety was published by ABC News online.
Oct 2008- Feb 2009: DOHA project to develop an IM/IT capacity building resource for general practice.
The University of New South Wales's Centre for Health Informatics (CHI) is engaged by the Commonwealth Department of Health and Ageing (DoHA) to develop a general practice information management (IM)/ information technology (IT) capacity building resource. CHI is working with a consortium comprising is the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP), the Centre for Clinical Governance Research at UNSW, and Pen Computer Systems.
Development of the tool was informed by a
literature review of effective change management and behaviour change strategies relevant to Australian general practice with a specific focus on clinical processes; training/skills, IM/IT and organisational culture.
The consortium is presently undertaking consultations with stakeholders to seek comment on a draft version of the proposed resource called "Tool for Information Management Enhancement (TIME)" and broader general practice change management strategies. This project is due for completion in February 2009 with recommendations for a preferred option for IM capacity building and feedback about the proposed resource.
27 & 28 November 2008 - Workshop on Systems Thinking and Modelling for Health: Simple models for Complex System Dynamics
In this workshop we will use simple computer models to teach health professionals and researchers with minimum or no experience in modelling some of the key health system dynamics we have discovered while consulting and researching real world problems over the past two decades.
This will be a hands-on workshop using computer models to understand the concept of how structure determines behaviour by running virtual "what-if" experiments. These models will cover a wide range of problems across several disciplines, including health policy and planning, public health, epidemiology, clinical practice, hospital and emergency department management.
This workshop will be led by Dr Geoff McDonnell and Mark Heffernan.
For more details click
[here]
8 August 2008 - CHI WinterWorkshop on Next Generation Decision Support Systems
The two-day workshop concluded on Friday, 8/8/08. Several topics have been discussed from translational technologies to human-computer interfaces to psychological factors such as human error and decision making and the interactions among the experts in these disciplines were very insightful. The Center for Health Informatics would like to thank the attendees, presenters, keynotes and organisers of the winter workshop for the fascinating presentations and stimulating discussion.
6 August 2008 - Centre for Health Informatics Annual Report
The
CHI 2007 Annual Report is now available from the
Annual Reports section of this site. Printed copies are available on request from
chi@unsw.edu.au.
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