Invited speakers - Wednesday 27 July

A/Prof Rohan Essex
Chief Medical Information Officer, Canberra Health Services

From November 2022, the ACT’s Digital Health Record will not only transform how health care is provided in the ACT, it will also reshape the health and medical research landscape. In this presentation, Associate Professor Rohan Essex, the ACT’s Chief Medical Information Officer will provide an overview of the journey so far and the considerations made as the ACT prepares itself for the transformation to DHR.

Dr Daryl Cheng
Acting Chief Medical Information Officer, Royal Children’s Hospital, Melbourne

Dr Daryl Cheng will share the Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne and Parkville Precinct experience in their journey from paper-based to electronic medical records (EMR) – particularly in the domains of data and research. Using case examples of audit & quality improvement projects, patient registries and databases as well as clinical trials, this presentation will describe the joys and challenges of digital health EMR research.

Marc Emerson
University of Canberra Human Research Ethics Committee

How are you using the data that you collect for your research? Are you collecting more data than you actually need? How do you store the data that you collect? Using health data respectfully is key to good research practice. This presentation aims to guide you on fulfilling your ethical obligations when it comes to the data that you collect and use. 
 

Professor Ray Lovett
Senior Research Fellow – National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, The Australian National University
 

Dr Ekavi Georgousopoulou
Director Research Analytics, Centre for Health and Medical Research, ACT Health Directorate

Health Analytics Research Collaborative (HARC), as a collaboration between ACT Health Directorate, Canberra Health Services and academic partners focused on health data science, research methods and analytics in both qualitative and quantitative areas, aims to drive high quality and efficient research and innovation, strengthen collaborations and accelerate translation of knowledge to practice and policy. In this presentation, Associate Professor Georgousopoulou will share examples and describe the benefits of collaborative approaches to research, bringing teams together with complementary skills.

Professor Maria Craig
Professor, Discipline of Paediatrics, Faculty of Medicine, UNSW Sydney

ADDN, established 10 years ago, is a longitudinal clinical quality registry of all forms of diabetes in youth and type 1 diabetes in adults. ADDN’s core activities include 6 monthly benchmarking, evaluation of federally funded CGM programs and provision of data to researchers, including collaboration with international registries.

Dr Penney Upton
Associate Professor, Health Research Institute, Faculty of Health, University of Canberra

Health changes at a population level are typically measured and reported using numerical data. From monitoring the spread of infectious disease to reporting changes in smoking prevalence, quantification can tell us what change (if any) is happening. However qualitative data is needed to show how and why change happens – essential information for changing systems. We describe how success stories can influence positive systems change to improve health and wellbeing outcomes, using the Tackling Indigenous Smoking (TIS) Program as an exemplar.

Prof Jane Dahlstrom
Senior Staff Specialist, Anatomical Pathology, Canberra Health Services
Professor of Pathology, ANU Medical School, The Australian National University

Prof Paul Craft
Senior Staff Specialist, Medical Oncology Department; Clinical Director, Canberra and Region Cancer Centre, Canberra Health Services

The ACT and SENSW Breast Cancer Treatment Group commenced in 1997 with a voluntary group of breast cancer clinicians supported by a small team of Quality Assurance offices funded by the Canberra Health Services. To date, the group has diligently collected data from 6,676 consenting participants and has reported outcomes for over two decades. One of the key objectives of the Quality Assurance Project was to improve the quality of breast cancer treatment by promoting adherence to national breast cancer treatment guidelines and secondly to establish a database, unique in Australia, to enable researchers to answer important questions regarding treatment and outcome in a real-world setting.

Liam Toohey
Sports Epidemiologist, Athlete Performance Health, Australian Institute of Sport

Systematic collection of electronic injury and illness surveillance data has been undertaken by Australian national sporting organisations for the past ten years. These data have been vital in supporting a transition towards proactive models of care that prioritise prevention initiatives, while providing a means to longitudinally monitor athlete health outcomes.

Dr Daniel Christiadi
Immunology and Infectious Diseases Division, The Australian National University

We will discuss the application of machine learning, an artificial intelligence sub-field, in predicting the outcomes of patients with chronic kidney disease. The implementation of machine learning is made possible by the prospectively collected data in the electronic medical record.

Prof Kaaren Anstey
Scientia Professor and ARC Laureate Fellow in the School of Psychology, UNSW Sydney

The PATH through Life Study has collected data on a representative sample of adults originating from the Canberra and Queanbeyan regions and following them for 20 years. An overview of the dataset, experiences with data linkage and the role of cohort studies in the era of big data, will be presented.

Dr Jennifer Walsh
Research Fellow, National Centre for Population Health, Research School of Population Health, College of Health and Medicine, The Australian National University

Dr Danielle Butler
Research Fellow, Centre for Public Health Data and Policy, The Australian National University

In this presentation, we will showcase research using data from the Multi-Agency Data Integration Project, a new national data asset.  We will present an overview of the data and two example projects relevant for population health and clinical research. This will include research on education related variation in uptake of COVID-19 vaccinations and factors associated with under treatment of cardiovascular disease according to guideline recommended pharmacotherapy.

Prof Clive Sabel
Professor in Public Health (Spatial Epidemiology), Health Research Institute, Faculty of Health, University of Canberra

There is increasing evidence linking social context to depression. Adopting a life course approach, we focussed on how the changing nature of social environment, or neighbourhood context impacts on the subsequent risk of developing depression. Both changing neighbourhood character over time (where the individual remains static, but the neighbourhood changes), and the impact of an individual changing neighbourhood are considered.

The panel will explore key issues emerging from the presentations on this day.

Chair: Dr Jennifer Welsh
Panellists: Prof Rosemary Korda, Sandra Cook, Barry Sandison, A/Prof Rohan Essex