NHMRC funds kids care
Linking IT, AI and genomics
29 August 2019
Australian Institute of Health Innovation receives NHMRC funding to link IT, AI and genomics advances
Professor Jeffrey Braithwaite, Founding Director of the Australian Institute of Health Innovation (AIHI) at Macquarie University welcomes the announcement by the Minister for Health, the Hon Greg Hunt MP of $1.35 million in new National Health and Medical Research Council grant funding for AIHI research.
Professor Braithwaite’s project will improve care for children and adolescents with rare cancers or kidney disease by developing a unique learning system designed to quickly and precisely match the best available treatments and approaches with the individual child’s health and wellbeing needs.
This ground-breaking project will lay the foundation for leveraging sophisticated information technologies, data mining, machine learning and genomics to capture all the evidence a clinical team requires to determine a patient’s unique and individualised needs.
Professor Braithwaite said:
Every child is different, and this will be precision medicine at its best. We will design a framework to help clinicians connect the best available treatments with the individual needs of each child under their care.
Clinical teams need access to high quality information in real time, including the most up to date clinical evidence along with the patient’s own history, test results and personal preferences about how their care should be delivered, he said.
“We aim to build an information-infused, evidence-rich system that will be developed for these patients first, and then adapted to other clinical settings,” Professor Braithwaite said.
“No such healthcare project exists in Australia whereby the system we develop will learn from itself, integrating clinical, patient and genomics information. It will use machine learning and adapt quickly as a valuable resource supporting clinical teams to make decisions about care and ensuring a best fit for each patient in a real-world setting; and importantly, be continuously evaluated, he said.
This research will be undertaken in collaboration with the Zero Childhood Cancer Program and KidGen, the Australian Genomics Renal Genetics Flagship project.
Professor Braithwaite is a leading health services and systems researcher with an international reputation for his work investigating and contributing to systems improvement in Australia and internationally.
The Australian Institute of Health Innovation is a research-intensive institute conducting world-class research into the people, policies and practice of healthcare in order to enhance the delivery of quality, safe, efficient and affordable healthcare.
Investigator Grants are one of the NHMRC’s major new schemes that allocates substantial funding to researchers to pursue ambitious programs in health and medical research.
END
NHMRC Investigator Grant: Designing and implementing a real-world learning healthcare system: operationalising knowledge, data and practice for clinical microsystems of the 21st Century, awarded to Professor Jeffrey Braithwaite
CENTRES RELATED TO THIS NEWS
Centre for Healthcare Resilience and Implementation Science
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT
Chrissy Clay, Research Outreach Coordinator