Health Informatics (eHealth)

Health Informatics (also called "eHealth") covers the use of Information and Communications Technologies in supporting clinical processes and services in many diverse healthcare situations. Some well known components of Health Informatics are:

  • clinical decision support
  • electronic health records
  • health communications / messaging
  • health information management and analysis
  • telehealth / telemedicine
  • web services health applications

Health Informatics at UWS concentrates on three broad areas within the ICT space:

  • Health Data, including databases, data analytics / mining, medical image data
  • Health Decisions, including computational learning and pattern recognition
  • Health Processes, including hospital systems and patient journey modelling

At UWS, a multidisciplinary approach is taken in our Health Informatics activities and projects involve collaborators from areas outside ICT, either internally (eg Business, Medicine, Nursing) or externally (eg GP, Hospital, Health Department).

Current Health Informatics Research (eHealth) Projects

  • "A healthy start to life" - Targeting the year before and the year after birth in Aboriginal children in remote areas, NHMRC (J Curry) in collaboration with Charles Darwin University (L Barclay) and University of Technology Sydney ( Sally Tracy)
  • Automatic Tracking of Eye Gaze Patterns: Application to Quality Assessment and Security (A Maeder) in collaboration with Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden (U Engelke)
  • Patient Journey Modelling Meta-Methodology (J Curry) in collaboration with University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Canada (C McGregor)
  • Repository system for digital mammogram research (A Maeder) in collaboration with Flinders University (M Bottema)
  • Walk 2.0 wellness/fitness monitoring with social networking extensions (Gregory Kolt, Anthony Maeder) with Central Queensland University (NHMRC 2010-11)
  • ManUp health challenge online system (Gregory Kolt, Anthony Maeder, Rhys Tague, Emma George) with Central Queensland University and CSIRO (Queensland Health 2010-12)
  • Business systems design/engineering for Telehealth processes using standard software component methodology (Anthony Maeder, Athula Ginige)
  • Adaptive blended data clustering methods for complex health datasets (Arshad Muhammad Mehar (PhD student), Anthony Maeder, Kenan Matawie)
  • Online health education and promotion environment for diabetes patients (Glenn Mason (PhD student), Ian Wilson, Anthony Maeder)
  • Visualization of patient vital signs timelines for chronic disease management systems (Rhys Tague (Hons student), Anthony Maeder, Quang Vinh Nguyen)

Current Staff Members Involved in Health Informatics (eHealth)