Informatics in health and aged care: a research program to support strategy development and implementation

Abstract

There is renewed interest in the application of information management and technology to health and aged care in many countries including those in the Middle East. Strategy development has anticipated a range of benefits to health from the application of IM&T. Information strategies in health have sometimes been problematic. While many of the technologies that have recently attracted attention emerged some decades ago the barriers to their wide-spread adoption requires further research. Desktop-based systems have not always been well adopted in healthcare and there is an expectation that more recent innovations such as mobile technologies may better suit the work-practices of these and other mobile clinicians. There is a need for assistance in the practical steps of evaluating technology, development and implementation of information standards, encouraging and enabling adoption of IM&T, and the development of rigorous financial cases for investment incorporating how benefits aims to be realised. There is also a need for the development of specific strategy for information management in aged care. All of these require a stronger research base including the development of methodologies, experimentation and learning through demonstrator projects. This research in progress paper outlines an active research program for health informatics with a particular focus on aged care that has been developed in collaboration with researchers from Japan, Australia, New Zealand and other countries to support the development, implementation and evaluation of IM&T.