Australian Institute of Health Innovation

The Australian Institute of Health Innovation (AIHI) was established in 2008 under the Faculty of Medicine. The AIHI brings together three successful UNSW research Centres working in separate but related areas of clinical governance, clinical practice and health services research and health informatics. The Centres are the:

Centre for Clinical Governance Research in Health;
Centre for Health Informatics
Simpson Centre for Health Services Research.

The founding Director is Professor Jeffrey Braithwaite and there are over seventy existing staff, PhD students and visiting academics associated with the Centres now newly relocated in the Australian Graduate School of Management UNSW on the Kensington Campus. In addition to the above, other colleagues from the Faculties, Schools and Centres will collaborate with AIHI to contribute skills and expertise to the larger enterprise. These include research expertise within the Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering, the Australian Business School and St Vincent’s Hospital. At its heart the AIHI addresses critical issues arising in current health systems that cannot effectively be addressed by single focus research centres.

Organisational Structure

Background

Health care reform and service innovation are the most pressing challenges to modern health care. Internationally health systems struggle to keep up with demand, driven by modern technologies, changing consumer preferences and an ageing population, and hindered by a diminishing workforce. Leading thinkers now see the radical reinvention of health care delivery, exploiting innovations in systems design and technology, as the only way of creating a health system that is sustainable and meets the needs and expectations of the community.

AIHI Objectives

The AIHI is positioned as an international centre of excellence in multidisciplinary research into the policy, organisation, management, technology, clinical care and systems science required to deliver high quality, safe, efficient and affordable health care in a range of settings. Its work will strongly emphasise implementation and translational research.

Vision

Through world-class research we are the leaders in health system innovation, achieved through the generation, dissemination and use of research knowledge to improve health systems.

Mission

Aims

Understanding clinician behaviour as a basis for practice improvement
Decision support systems and evidence based health care
Translational bioinformatics
Communication support systems
Designing models of care which provide improved patient safety and quality
Enhancing teamwork and inter-professional practice within services, and integration across services
Engendering change through new models of care and strategies for delivery
Designing intelligent services using information and communication technologies

Current Research

The participating Centres provide the existing capacity for the AIHI, and serve as a platform to create future capabilities to contribute innovative health solutions. This model allows individual Centres to maintain their existing identities while the AIHI can leverage the combined expertise to achieve substantial gains in research funding and research outputs. Table 1 and Table 2 summarises the current and future research agenda that constitutes the AIHI’s platform.

Table 1: The present research agenda – selected research initiatives

Focus	Problem	Exemplar research initiatives
Centre for Clinical Governance Research: Director: Professor Jeffrey Braithwaite
Improved governance, management, leadership and coordination of the health system	Health system needs improved organisation and leadership, and new models of practice	Australia’s most prominent and productive group in its field. Topics: accreditation; inter-professional learning; leadership; quality and safety; culture and structure; restructuring; and in international health care leadership issues.
Centre for Health Informatics: Director: Professor Enrico Coiera
The intelligent use of information and communication technologies to deliver high quality, safe, efficient and affordable health care	Health system needs to exploit the benefits of the IT revolution	Australia’s largest academic health informatics research group, Topics: intelligent search systems to support evidence-based healthcare, evaluation methodologies for IT, understanding how communication shapes the safety and quality of health care delivery. Centre researchers are 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 Simpson Centre for Health Services Research: Director: Professor Ken Hillman
Developing and evaluating innovative health services and clinical practice interventions	Patient safety in acute hospitals is a complex, policy resistant challenge	World-renowned research into medical emergency teams and capabilities; conducting the MERIT study, a cluster randomised control trial, which incorporated 23 hospitals across Australia; developing hospital-wide patient safety systems which has now been taken up in the majority of Australasian, North American and UK hospitals; pioneering day of surgery admissions in acute settings.

Table 2: The extended research agenda – foci for the AIHI

Topic	Focus	Problem
Patient safety	Safe systems and safe practices are required in patient safety in acute, private, public and primary care environments	Research to date is patchy and small-scale
Improving decision-making through better access to data and knowledge	Development of decision support environments and technologies that meet the needs of clinicians and policy makers	Access to integrated data and knowledge has hampered roll out of effective decision support technologies
Health policy analysis	Policy into practice research	The policy-practice interface is a minefield, with a poor knowledge base
Building effective health systems	Innovative delivery arrangements	Little rigour or assessment of the range of delivery options and what constitutes effective delivery of care
Program and project evaluation	Rigorous analysis to learn from present and past initiatives	Too few programs and projects are evaluated and innovative experience and learning is lost

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