Dr Gallego-Luxan and Dr Adam Dunn awarded NHMRC Project Grants

Two researchers from the Centre for Health Informatics in the Australian Institute of Health Innovation (AIHI) have been awarded Project Grants totalling $997,616 in the most recent announcement from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC).

Dr Blanca Gallego-Luxan, who leads the Analytics Lab, was awarded $520,968 to undertake research that will enable personalised cohort studies from large repositories of clinical practice data.

“While clinicians provide treatment decisions and prognoses for individual patients, traditional models of evidence are mostly based on averages over potentially heterogeneous populations, and often fail to represent patients with common comorbidities or medications. These limitations represent a significant barrier to lowering the cost of healthcare and improving quality of care.

This research project will generate important information and tools needed to use clinical practice data to learn from the treatments and outcomes of ‘patients like mine’. It will help bring the power of health analytics from the research lab to clinical practice.”

Dr Adam Dunn, who leads the Evidence Surveillance team, was awarded $476,648 to study new methods for tracking the influence and geospatial clustering of vaccine misinformation.

"We will develop tools to monitor social media data - estimating differences in exposure to different kinds of evidence and misinformation - and see whether we can use those data to explain why vaccine hesitancy and refusal cluster in certain communities.”

The NHMRC Project Grants scheme supports the creation of new knowledge by funding the best investigator-initiated research project plan of five years, or less, in any area relevant to human health. The overall funding rate in the current round of Project Grants was 15.2%.

L to R: Dr Adam Dunn, Dr Blanca Gallego-Luxan

Groups related to this news

Centre for Health Informatics

News date

Thursday, 8 December 2016