Congratulations to Associate Professor Farah Magrabi from the Australian Institute of Health Innovation, Centre for Health Informatics on winning an inaugural Research Action Award from Sax Institute.
The Institute established the annual awards this year to recognise research that supports policy decisions that make a real-world difference to people’s health and wellbeing.
“The winning applications are outstanding examples of research that is making a critical contribution to health and health systems,” says Sax Institute CEO Professor Sally Redman. “Our award winners have not only undertaken research about issues of immediate relevance to those who make health decisions, they have also found elegant ways to have their findings acted upon.”
Associate Professor Magrabi has sought to shed more light on the poorly understood area of patient safety risk posed by e-health systems. From her world-first analysis of IT safety incidents, she developed a new classification system for e-health risks. This has become the de facto international standard for analysing IT safety incidents.
She has led major pieces of work looking at IT-related safety risks in the US and England and her work is shaping policy to govern e-health safety, including recommendations from the US Institute of Medicine accepted by the US Government. Associate Professor Magrabi has also developed a new IT incident-monitoring system that has been tested in general practices across Australia.
“E-health has many benefits but when IT systems are poorly designed and used they pose risks to patient safety,” says Associate Professor Magrabi. “It is really highly significant to have our research recognised in this way as this is an issue of major significance and urgency. IT systems for pathology, medications, radiology and record-keeping play a mission-critical role in our hospitals and GP surgeries but there is not yet any active surveillance of IT-related harm currently experienced by health systems in Australia or elsewhere.”
Watch an interview with Associate Professor Magrabi below.