Macquarie University

The Centre for Health Informatics (CHI) is Australia’s largest academic research group in this emerging discipline. The Centre’s work is internationally recognised for its ground breaking contributions in the development of intelligent search systems to support evidence-based healthcare, developing evaluation methodologies for IT, and in understanding how communication shapes the safety and quality of health care delivery. Centre researchers are also working on safety models and standards for IT in healthcare, mining complex gene microarray, 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 diagnosis of 3-D medical images.

The Centre of Health Informatics (CHI) is building an international reputation as a research leader in the application of information technology to healthcare. Its principal aim is to map the complex organisational systems that shape today’s health system and to design rigorous, system-wide interventions that provide a sustainable platform for future health systems, locally and internationally.

The Centre’s main activities are the development of intelligent systems to support evidence-based healthcare, the development and application of evaluation tools to assess the impacts of information technology in healthcare, and fostering an awareness of how management and communication systems shape the safety and quality of healthcare delivery.

The Centre conceives that the potential use of information and communication technology in healthcare settings will occur incrementally in some areas and radically in others. It also acknowledges that while some changes in healthcare are highly predictable, others are clouded by an uncertain, and potentially chaotic future. The Centre for Health Informatics is a research partner to major healthcare providers, research institutions and governments, including the New South Wales Department of Health, the National Institute of Clinical Studies and the Commonwealth Department of Health.