About Us
Our Research
More than four in five Australians visit their GP once per year and two million attend every week. As medical knowledge continues to increase at an exponential rate it is critical that this knowledge is translated effectively into the general practice setting.
Our program aims to facilitate quality and system improvement in general practice using a data-driven and integrated knowledge translation approach. We are a multidisciplinary team that works closely with health informaticians, analyst programmers and other key technical staff to develop technology, study factors critical to its implementation and evaluate its effectiveness.
The program currently has four main themes:
- Future Health Today: FHT is a proactive digital health intervention that uses data from health records to automate the detection of chronic disease and provide new opportunities for early intervention and improved health outcomes. This program is a collaboration between the University of Melbourne and Western Health.
- Torch Recruit: An in-house automated algorithm that eliminates the time and effort normally spent recruiting patients for clinical trials.
- Antimicrobial stewardship: Working in collaboration with the National Centre for Antimicrobial Stewardship we co-design, implement and evaluate strategies for optimising appropriate antimicrobial prescribing in general practice to reduce the development of antimicrobial resistance and improve patient safety.
- Big data and epidemiology: We undertake research using primary care data to describe and evaluate general practice activity in order to inform quality improvement and service optimisation, as well as to develop risk prediction tools that can be incorporated into general practice.