Prof. Jim Warren, Chair in Health Informatics

I'm Chief Scientist for the National Institute for Health Innovation (NIHI). NIHI's mission is to create, evaluate and promote innovative health information technology that improves health outcomes and reduces inequalities in healthcare delivery. Note: my group has created a forum, the Health Innovation Exchange or hive - have a look, sign up, post your thoughts. My position is joint between the Department of Computer Science and the School of Population Health. My office is on the 3rd floor of the School of Population Health building (building 730, room 357) at the Tamaki Campus in suburban Auckland. Health Informatics at The University of Auckland. I'm programme director for the Postgraduate Diploma in Health Sciences in Health Informatics, which can extend to a Master of Health Sciences. In this programme I teach HLTHINFO 728 Principles of Health Informatics and HLTHINFO 730 Healthcare Decision Support Systems. Note that Honours and Postgraduate Diploma students in Computer Science and Software Engineering can get permission to take select Health Informatics postgraduate courses. I'm also available to supervise research students from either Health or Computing backgrounds (and those with mixed backgrounds are most especially welcome!). We also have a third year elective in Health Informatics for students in the Bachelor of Health Sciences.

Since most of the detail about HLTHINFO 730 Healthcare Decision Support Systems is hidden behind the wall of Cecil, I've put a copy of some key files from the semester 1 2009 offering here for your information. We're next running the course in semester 2, 2010, and I'm very interested to have a mix of both technical and clinical students enrolled.

I'm delighted to announce that for 2010 we're offering a package of four courses in fully online flexible delivery mode. This means you can start the Postgraduate Diploma in Health Sciences (Health Informatics) from overseas and, with this package of four courses, you can stop at that point with a Postgraduate Certificate in Health Sciences, or continue on to finish the Postgraduate Diploma.

Note that while we are doing online (aka, 'distance') delivery in 2010, local students are still very welcome to enrol and enjoy the modern and convenient learning format.

The fee for international students is about NZ$4000 per course. You can apply by clicking here. Note that a Distance Education coordinator has been engaged to help with your application and enrolment process - click here to contact.

I'm proud of the fact that the course is practical in orientation. Our students are very diverse, and many of our them are already working in the industry (in health delivery, health IT support, health software development or the research sector). We create an environment where the students learn from each other in addition to taking in "the syllabus" per se. We also reinforce this with a lot of guest speakers. The idea is to help our students be more effective agents in the complex enterprise of improving healthcare delivery. We look at the gamut of applications spanning community based care, hospital systems, public health, governance and, to an ever-increase degree [probably my favourite area], consumer health informatics. We also prepare students for higher studies if they want to go onto masters or PhD research in the area. See some testimonials from our graduates.

Research

My research is focused on three (sometimes inter-related) aspects of innovative use of IT for chronic disease management:

• Systems - ways that IT can make the 'traditional' healthcare system work better: e.g., integration of care plans into electronic health records, clinical decision support systems
• Empowerment - getting all stakeholders to maximize their contribution to the health of an individual with good communications pathways: e.g., prioritized web-based health consumer education (to empower the consumer in their own care), clinical uses of mobile devices (to collect and share information)
• Quality Assurance - mostly concerned with data mining to discover areas in need of improvement: e.g., temporal analysis of community based electronic prescribing records

Some of my most active research at present is in analysis of electronic prescribing (particularly for long-term adherence to blood pressure lowering medications); analysis of electronic discharge summaries; meta-data coding of consumer health Web pages; and the new New Zealand-Korea Health Robotics Centre. I've also been doing quite a lot of commissioned research for the Ministry of Health on directions in health IT.

I'm always interested in good students for project, dissertation and thesis work that relates to this research agenda. Probably best to contact me directly about current topics that are on-the-go. Of particular interest at the moment:

• We have a scholarship available for a masters student to start in February 2010 on examination of the interoperability of elder care robots with existing health IT systems - see Health Informatics Masters 2. Also, here is a quick and easy descriptions as a Powerpoint. The opportunity is really best suited to a domestic NZ student (i.e., someone who isn't paying international fees) - it'll cover domestic fees for the year plus a NZ$14k stipend. If you're international, it won't cover even the fees, and you'll still need something to live on, so forget it unless you have support from back home, sorry. The degree would be administered from the Department of Computer Science, but you'd be working with a multi-disciplinary team including engineers, doctors and psychologists. Note that this will be principally a software oriented thesis - no soldering required; a Bachelor of Computer Science or Software Engineering with a good level of honours would be the most appropriate preparation.
• I'd be very interested to see a student with a health sciences background who might do a dissertation or masters on patient perceptions of their electronic discharge summaries
• I'd be interested to find a PhD student to extend our research in data mining of electronic medical records to detection and clustering of high-use ("frequent flyer") patients.

Some of my current PhD students:

• Mrs Mehnaz Adnan
• Mr Guocai (Jose) Chen
• Ms Yulong (Helen) Gu
• Dr Janet Liang
• Mr Thusitha Mabotuwana

Some of my past PhD students:

• Dr Sistine Barretto
• Dr Eric Browne
• Dr Jean-Pierre Calabretto
• Dr Alex Davidovic
• Dr Svetla Gadzhanova
• Dr Chunlan Ma

Other Roles and Responsibilities

Health Informatics New Zealand (HINZ). I'm Chair of HINZ for 2008-2010. I was Scientific Program Committee Chair for the HINZ Conference and Exhibition 2006, 2007 and 2008. Consider submitting a paper to the HINZ 2009 Conference or to the HINZ journal, Healthcare and Informatics Review Online.

Australian College for Health Informatics (AHCI). I'm a Foundation Fellow and the Membership Chair for ACHI, Australia's peak professional body for health informatics. I've proposed that ACHI widen it's scope to include New Zealand (this was approved in late 2009 - so all you Kiwi Health Informatics Heroes should think about applying for Member or Fellow status in ACHI!)

Australasian Workshop on Health Informatics and Knowledge Management (HIKM 2010) at Australasian Computer Science Week (ACSW). I Chaired this workshop at the Australasian Computer Science Week in Wellington, 20-23 Jan, 2009. Looking forward to sitting back and letting others chair HIKM 2010 in Brisbane in January!

Deputy Head of Department, Research for Computer Science. The research directions of our staff are organised into five research groups.

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). I co-lecture COMPSCI345/SOFTENG350 - our stage 3 course in HCI. It's always great to work with students who've learned a great deal about writing software to address the question of how to write software that will help people to do their job well.

My Career

I took up the Chair in Health Informatics at the University of Auckland in November 2005. I made the move here because the environment provides the opportunity to really make a difference - what, with a world class medical school, excellent computer science department, active local health IT industry and a proactive Ministry of Health! The School of Population Health, wherein my office and my Institute are located, provides a particularly stimulating and helpful setting combining General Practice, Epidemiology and Biostatistics, the Clinical Trials Research Unit, Health Systems, Maori and Pacific Health, and Social and Community Health, as well as onsite clinics.

I worked for the University of South Australia from 1993 to 2005, and you'll still find the Web page for the Health Informatics Laboratory that I founded there (now directed by my good colleague, Dr Jan Stanek).

I did my Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and PhD in Information Systems at the University of Maryland's UMBC campus. I was awarded my PhD in mid 1992 with a dissertation (which they'd call a 'thesis' in this part of the world) in Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) / Simulation Systems... basically I was looking at interactive decision support technology.

Publications

Contact details

• Postal:
  Department of Computer Science - Tamaki
  University of Auckland
  Private Bag 92019 Auckland 1142
  NEW ZEALAND
• Office:
  Epidemiology and Biostatistics
  Room 730.357, School of Population Health
  Gate 1, 261 Morrin Rd, Glen Innes
  (deliveries should go to Reception on level 2)
• Phone:
  voice: +64 9 373 7599 x86422
  fax: +64 9 303 7503
• Electronic:
  email: gym (but spelled the other way) at cs.auckland.ac.nz