Health Data Integration (HDI) (Core Project 1)
This project is developing software tools for linking, integrating and analysing data for cancer patients, in conjunction with Queensland Health's cancer program. The major challenge is to achieve interoperability for medical records held in disparate databases while preserving the privacy of patients. The project is delivering large-scale coordination of databases to improve quality and safety in health care.
Queensland Health, through the Queensland Cancer Control and Analysis Team (QCCAT) has been working with the Australian e-Health Research Centre in a program to link cancer data sets across Queensland. This continues as an on-going project at QCCAT with software and data analysis support from the Australian e-Health Research Centre. The research program has been extended to linking of other clinical and operational data sets. More...
Health Information Environment (HIE)
Australian e-Health Research Centre researchers and engineers are developing novel applications for the processing and use of health and medical data. Health and medical data is stored using any number of technologies and formats with differing requirements of privacy and security.
The technical and application domains which are of interest to our researchers and engineers include:
- database and data integration technology
- clustering and analysis of patient data
- electronic health records
- ontology engineering
- query and retrieval of complex data
- natural language processing
Cancer Stage Interpretation System (CSIS) (Core Project 3)
This project builds upon a core CSIRO research capability in multimedia content analysis within the health domain, focusing on a particular application: support systems for cancer management, both for individual patients and population-level analyses. More...
Care Assessment Platform (CAP) (Core Project 6)
The Australian e-Health Research Centre will conduct clinical trials in conjunction with the Redcliffe-Caboolture Health Service District across the local community primary healthcare setting to develop a prototype of a Care Assessment Platform to enable clinical assessment of functional capacity and the underlying physiological condition among a cohort of chest pain and chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases(COPD) patients in the community. More...
Biomedical Imaging
CSIRO researchers are developing new tools to analyse and extract valuable information from medical images, such as magnetic resonance imaging (anatomical, functional, spectroscopy), computed tomography, positron emission tomography, ultrasound imaging, molecular imaging, and histology imaging. More...
AMIDA (Augmented Multi-party Interaction with Distant Access) (Partner Project 3)
AMIDA commenced in October 2006 as an Integrated Project in the European Union's 6th Framework Programme. As a partner in AMIDA, the Australian e-Health Research Centre is collaborating with a consortium of 12 international research partners coordinated by the University of Edinburgh (UK) and the IDIAP Research Institute (Switzerland).
The AMIDA project is researching technologies that support human communication in co-located and distributed team meetings, and involves several disciplines including:
- Qualitative human analysis and human factors
- Audio-video processing, including unconstrained speech recognition and natural scene analysis
- Multimodal structure and content analysis, including the modelling of individuals and groups, through the joint processing of multiple (multimodal) information channels (audio, visual, slides, handwriting, and white board activity)
- Human Computer Interface, application prototyping, evaluation, and system integration
Within this context, the eHealth Research Centre will conduct research into multimodal content analysis technologies to better support and evaluate meetings in the health sector. In response to the increasing emphasis on clinical networks in the delivery of health services, a particular focus will be on the evaluation of leadership and cohesion in clinical teams through automated measures and models of group dynamics.
Queensland Facility for Advanced Bioinformatics (QFAB) (Partner Project 4)
QFAB commenced operations in December 2006 upon the signing of agreements with the Queensland Government through the Department of State Development and Trade. Professor Mark Ragan from The Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB) at The University of Queensland and Dr Anthony Maeder from the Australian e-Health Research were awarded a research grant of $1.9 million to establish QFAB through Round 1 of the Smart State Innovation Funds. The funding is being used to develop a facility that will support innovation within the Queensland biotechnology, health and the ICT sectors offering integrated data and high performance computing in a secure environment with affordable bandwidth and access to expert personnel.
QFAB is an unincorporated joint venture between The University of Queensland, Griffith University, Queensland University if Technology, Australian e-Health Research Centre, Queensland Department of Primary Industries and Fisheries, Queensland Parallel Supercomputing Foundation and the Australian Partnership in Advanced Computing. QFAB is located at the IMB.
Australian Cancer Grid – Merging of colorectal cancer surveillance databases from tertiary institutions across states (Partner Project 5)
As part of the Australian Cancer Grid, this project will integrate disparate databases of bowel cancer surveillance information from two states and tertiary institutions. In addition, it will integrate in-hospital endoscopy reporting information, surveillance databases and where feasible, colorectal cancer data bases to facilitate operations of in-hospital monitoring of care and health outcomes. It is also hoped that this will provide a model information system of direct relevance to the National Bowel Cancer Screening Programme (NBCSP).
In the first stage, the respective bowel cancer surveillance data sources of the Royal Melbourne Hospital in Victoria, and the Flinders Medical Centre and the Repatriation General Hospital in South Australia, will be merged together using the Molecular Medicine Informatics Model (Bio21: MMIM) and Health Data Integration (HDI) platforms. This will not be a simple integration task, as each site has their own representation of each clinical concept, and the capture of that information in each data source is significantly different. The next stage will extend the data integration to colonoscopy information at each hospital, and finally into other additional data sources if possible using the Bio21: MMIM and HDI platforms.
A range of analyses will be performed on the integrated data sets to assist with case-management and monitoring of outcomes, and also to inform questions pertaining to an individual’s level of risk and recommended surveillance program.
This project is a joint initiative of Science Technology and Innovation Infrastructure Grants Program Victoria and CSIRO Preventative Health Flagship.
Centralised Remote Access Cancer Care Co-ordination (CRACCC) Trial (Partner Project 6)
The objective of this research is to determine the impact of a centralised cancer-care co-ordination intervention to improve care processes and patient outcomes in the six months following colorectal cancer surgery. The multidisciplinary team will develop measures of cancer care co-ordination and follow this with a multi-centre randomised trial of CRACCC involving hospitals throughout NSW.
Study 2 of this program involves the development and evaluation of Health Data Integration (HDI) technology as used to facilitate case management by care co-ordinators. HDI will be used to link data from diverse sources (such as hospital databases, pathology databases, cancer clinical registries and other oncology or GP databases) with the aim of improving the flow of information and the time taken to collate this by cancer care co-ordinators, thereby improving clinical care. Following a ’proof of concept’ trial to be undertaken at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, a ’pre-post’ study involving 30 cancer care co-ordinators throughout the state will be undertaken to evaluate the usefulness of HDI in actual clinical settings.
This project is a joint initiative of the Cancer Institute NSW Health Services Research Grants Program, the Surgical Outcomes Research Centre, the University of Sydney and NSW Health.
Patient Admissions Prediction Project
Accurate forecasting will assist many areas of health management, from basic bed management and staff resourcing to scheduling elective surgery. However by more accurately forecasting load there will also be a reduction in stress for staff and an improvement in patient outcomes. Emergency departments already know there’s a pattern to presentations and admissions, but existing models are very simplistic.
Collaborating with clinicians from Gold Coast and Toowoomba Hospitals and Griffith University and Queensland University of Technology, The Australian e-Health Research Centre has developed a software package to assist hospital emergency medical staff predict demand on their services. The Patient Admission Prediction Tool (PAPT) will allow on-the-ground staff to see what the patient load will be like in the next hour, the rest of the day, into next week, or even on holidays with varying dates, such as Easter. PAPT uses historical data to provide an accurate prediction of the expected load on any day.
The PAPT tool has been validated and shown to vastly improve successful prediction of patient presentation and admission in two hospitals with very different populations. Importantly the tool was designed after user meetings with over 15 bed managers and hospital administrators performed by our collaborators at Griffith University. The AEHRC is aiming to evaluate the impact of the tool at major hospitals over the next 12 months.
Project collaborators include Queensland Health, Griffith University and Queensland University of Technology.
PhD Sponsorship (Affiliate Project 1)
This Australian e-Health Research Centre sponsored PhD project will investigate the use of trusted agents in a distributed intelligence approach to the problem of interrogating multiple independent databases without compromising data privacy. This approach will allow local processing of data such as data mining, inexact matching or statistical analysis, in order to process global queries more efficiently and securely.
PhD Sponsorship (Affiliate Project 2)
This Australian e-Health Research Centre sponsored PhD project addresses issues of resource management and scheduling in health systems. The complexity and changeability of interacting factors affecting the assignment of resources demands a very flexible and dynamic solution, in order to achieve a high level of utilization and cater for many different competing priorities. The project will provide a compound strategy for optimization of resource allocation under time varying circumstances.
PHD Sponsorship (Affiliate Project 5)
This Australian e-Health Research Centre sponsored PhD project will investigate if immobilization of older patients is a major contributing factor to their long length of stay in hospital. This will be achieved through clinical trials of ambulatory monitoring conducted on older patients to record their movement during their stay in a hospital setting. From this, signal processing and data analysis will be performed to quantify mobilisation and functional status of patients to characterise their level of immobilisation. Moreover, the analysis will aim to demonstrate if areas of improvement in mobility and functional status can reduce older patients' stay in hospital.
Flinders Medical Centre CRC Data Integration - Stage 2 (Affiliate Project 6)
Initial work with Flinders Medical Centre and the Repatriation General Hospital in Adelaide included the linking of data sources containing colonoscopy information, in-hospital cancer registry information and surveillance program information and analysis of this integrated information is underway. Over the next six months, we are planning to include additional sources such as pathology, screening research and tissue bank, and to further develop user abilities in use of the Health Data Integration (HDI) system and the resulting analysis.
PhD Sponsorship: Clinical networks: can more effective clinical leadership in decision making improve the effectiveness of clinical networks? (Affiliate Project 7)
Griffith University, Australian e-Health Research Centre and Queensland Health Collaborative Research Project
Clinical networks have been established to enable clinicians to more fully participate in the management of health services in Queensland. They represent a new organizational entity which promises to enhance coordination between services; facilitate better access to services and improve outcomes. Current evidence suggests that effective network based organisations require leaders who have innovative problem solving skills, the ability to manage group decision making and a readiness to engage in reciprocal behaviours.
This research project will identify which leadership behaviors and group interactions are associated with the effectiveness of clinical networks. The project will utilise recent developments in IT tools which enable the annotation and analysis of speakers and meetings and provide a promising avenue for the automated collection, coding and analysis for the empirical study of clinical group decision making.
