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Faculty of Medicine and Health
Digital Health and Informatics Network
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DHIN Newsletter | Issue 30, November 2020
Dear test
Welcome to the 30th issue of the DHIN newsletter and the last for 2020—Congratulations to Jacqueline Wells for her tremendous diligence and perseverance to advance the DHIN. This has been a year of incredible challenges but also incredible innovation. A year where digital health has played such a crucial role in understanding and treating COVID-19 and also enabling the healthcare system to support all patients. A lot has happened to strengthen the digital health landscape at the University of Sydney in 2020, building on the foundation set up in 2018 with the formation of the Faculty of Medicine and Health. In February eHealth@Sydney 2020 was fortunate to be one of the last events to be held on campus, enabling the digital health community to meet in person before lockdown began. The event featured keynote speaker Professor Chuck Friedman who encouraged attendees to consider how a national learning health system could be implemented in Australia, and shared research on the socio-technical infrastructure required to achieve this in other settings. The new Discipline of Biomedical Informatics and Digital Health commenced this year and we welcomed Associate Professor Adam Dunn as Head of Discipline. The new discipline now has 46 members and a number of exciting projects and activities planned for 2021.
I would like to thank all members of the Digital Health and Informatics Network for sharing stories and resources, continuing to support the network, and creating such an engaged community of digital health thinkers. I am looking forward to seeing all that 2021 will bring and I wish you all a safe and joyous holiday period.
Best wishes,
Heiko
Professor Heiko Spallek
Academic Lead, Digital Health and Health Service Informatics
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Member Profile
This month we spend five minutes with Dr Rachael Rietdijk, Speech Pathologist and Project Manager on The Social Brain Toolkit.
Please tell us a little bit about yourself. I am a speech pathologist and postdoctoral research fellow currently working as the project manager on The Social Brain Toolkit project, supported by the icare foundation. This project involves working as part of our team in the University of Sydney Acquired Brain Injury Communication Lab, headed up by Professor Leanne Togher. The Social Brain Toolkit will be a suite of resources designed to support communication and connection after a brain injury. We are currently developing and piloting the resources in preparation towards a launch in 2022.
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Last digital health lunchtime seminar for 2020!
Unprecedented studies for unprecedented times
Presented by Professor Tom Snelling | Tuesday 1st December, 12.00pm-12.45pm.
Tom will present an overview of adaptive trials methodology, in the context of the COVID-19 Pandemic, and its particular suitability to the uncertainty of these times.
Professor Tom Snelling is a paediatric infectious diseases physician at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead and a professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Sydney. He leads a team of researchers aiming to improve healthcare by implementing learning health systems approaches in children and adults. Tom is working in the application of new approaches in the design, implementation and analysis of public interest studies, and is leading a number of multi-institutional collaborative learning health projects across Australia. He is the clinical lead of the Clinical Data Analytics Platform (CDAP) a national initiative aiming to assist frontline healthcare workers to provide evidence-based care for COVID-19 disease.
Zoom link for all lunchtime seminars: https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/86558031655
Passcode: 819580
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Event update: Digital Health Week 2021eHealth@Sydney and eHealth@Melbourne
February 8th-11th 2021 | Please save the date for an online program of events hosted by the University of Sydney and the University of Melbourne. The theme for the 2021 conference is Pushing the Boundaries of Health Care.
Submissions for Digital Health Week 2021 closed last week and there was an overwhelmingly positive response! To name just a few - abstract submissions have been received from 6 different countries, from around Australia, Universities in Melbourne and Sydney, eHealth NSW, Local Health Districts and from both established and emerging researchers.
Thank you to everyone who submitted and is sharing how they have been pushing the boundaries of health care. Work is underway on finalising a scientific program and we look forward to sharing an exciting program with you all over the coming weeks.
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Research Student ProfileThis month we are pleased to feature PhD candidate and Project Manager at the Australian Clinical Trials Alliance (ACTA), Nicola Straiton. Nic is also a valued member of the Digital Health Week 2021 Working Group.
Please tell us a little about yourself. I am a nurse (originally from the UK) with a specialist background in cardiovascular disease, currently undertaking a PhD in the field within the Faculty of Medicine and Health at the University of Sydney.
I am passionate and nerdy about all things research, I started off on this journey by completing an undergraduate degree in Biomedical Science and was lucky enough to work in Germany for a year in a cell biology lab. But I wanted to see how science could really improve health outcomes both at an individual patient level and for different communities, to do this I retrained and completed my Masters in Adult Nursing. This career expansion allowed me to translate (both practically and in plain language) what we learnt at the science bench into real-world health outcomes for patients and their families.
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Digital Health ECR Sessions: Stories on Applying for Funding
Thursday 10th December, 2020 | 12.00pm-1.00pm
Panel members: Associate Professor Melissa Baysari, Professor Maree Teesson AC, Professor Leanne Togher, and Professor Jean Yang. Chair: Associate Professor Adam Dunn
We hope you can join us online for the first of the Digital Health ECR Sessions, which will be a panel discussion on grant applications, including: how to decide on, prepare for, and develop funding applications for fellowships, projects, and partnerships. There will also be an opportunity for Q&A with the panel.
The Digital Health Early Career Researchers Sessions are focused on biomedical informatics and digital health research but are open to anyone from the University of Sydney interested in developing skills and experience in multidisciplinary research. Brought to you by the Discipline of Biomedical Informatics and Digital Health.
*Please note: This session is open to anyone at the University of Sydney, please feel free to share across your network. Once registered, a link to the session will be emailed separately to all attendees.
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Discipline of Biomedical Informatics and Digital Health (BIDH) update
2020 has been an interesting year for biomedical informatics and digital health at the University of Sydney. BIDH was created through an expression of interest round midway through the year and is now a team with lots of complementary skills and experience, and a plan to transform how we work together to advance education and research in the space.
In this last update of the year, we wanted to highlight two things that are relevant to the DHIN happening early in 2021:
- We are updating the structure of the Seminar Series to highlight more of our excellent postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers and educators. As always, these are open to everyone from the DHIN.
- The very successful eHealth@Sydney event will be held jointly with the University of Melbourne to become a joint Sydney/Melbourne digital health week in 2021. The organisers are doing an excellent job setting this up, and there will be short courses run alongside.
When 2020 started, the new discipline was still being planned, and despite everything that the year tried to do to disrupt research activity, we saw many successes. Dr Andrew Campbell and Dr Brad Ridout were awarded a Bupa Foundation grant to progress their cyberpsychology work. Professor Nick Buckley and team were part of the multi-institutional Centre for Research Excellence in Medicines Intelligence, and ARDC Data Partnerships Funding. He was also elected as a new Fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences. In recognition of research outputs, an article on conversational agents co-authored by Associate Professor Adam Dunn was named as the most cited article published in the last two years in JAMIA at the AMIA Symposium, and Associate Professor Melissa Baysari received the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society of Australia Alan Welford Award.
As we approach 2021, we are looking forward to continuing our plans for updating digital health education across the faculty, and growing the community of researchers across all areas of biomedical informatics and digital health. Please feel free to reach out to any of us with your ideas or plans in the area because we would love to help. If you haven’t already, make sure you sign up for the BIDH Bulletin to get more information about upcoming seminars and get calendar invites for special seminars and workshops we have planned.
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International Symposium on Digital Health 2020 - A Virtual EventThursday 3rd December 2020 | The International Symposium on Digital Health is an annual event which aims at connecting experts from both the healthcare and engineering sectors in the world and promoting interdisciplinary research in digital health. This year, various interprofessional experts will share their latest digital health initiatives during the COVID-19 pandemic and their vision on digital health in the post-COVID-19 era.
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Digital Health CRC and the University of Sydney updatePractice Analytics | By Dr Anna Janssen.
This month’s Digital Health CRC update is on the project Using practice analytics to understand variation and support reflective practice.The project is a collaboration between Industry partners Adventist HealthCare, Cabrini Health Australia, St John of God Health Care and the Royal Australasian College of Physicians and University partners the University of Sydney and Monash University. Professor Tim Shaw, who is the lead investigator on the project, has kindly agreed to answer some questions about the project to share with the DHIN.
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Read, Watch, Follow...- REGISTER: Trust in Artificial Intelligence: Australian Insights 2020. Open to all from the University of Sydney.
- CELTIC-NEXT project proposals: due 12th April 2021.
- READ: Sydney Health Partners Impact Report.
- LISTEN: Australian Healthtech Venture Capital Panel Discussion
- READ: What the public hopes and fears about the use of AI in health care
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