Objectives: Building a sustainable health system in the 21st Century will require the reinvention of much of the present day system, and the intelligent use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to deliver high quality, safe, efficient and affordable health care. The Centre for Health Informatics (CHI) is Australia's largest academic research group in this emerging discipline.
Methods: Our research is underpinned by a planning process, based on different future scenarios for the health system, which helps us identify longer-term problems needing a sustained research effort. A research competency matrix is used to ensure that the Centre has the requisite core capabilities in the research methods and tools needed to pursue our research program.
Results: The Centre's work is internationally recognized for its contributions in the development of intelligent search systems to support evidence-based healthcare, developing evaluation methodologies for ICT, and in understanding how communication shapes the safety and quality of health care delivery. Centre researchers also are working on safety models and standards for ICT in healthcare, mining complex gene micro array, medical literature and medical record data, building health system simulation methods to model the impact of health policy changes, and developing novel computational methods to automate the diagnosis of 3-D medical images.
Conclusions: Any individual research group like CHI must necessarily focus on a few areas to allow it to develop sufficient research capacity to make novel and internationally significant contributions. As CHI approaches the end of its first decade, it is becoming clear that developing capacity becomes increasingly challenging as the research territory changes under our feet, and that the Centre will continue to evolve and shift its focus in the years to come.