Professor Teng Liaw is one of the inaugural experts in health informatics selected to join an international forum to help develop national and global eHealth policy.
Gabrielle Dunlevy
UNSW Media Office
02 9385 1933
g.dunlevy@unsw.edu.au
UNSW Professor of General Practice Teng Liaw has been named one of 100 inaugural members of the International Academy of Heath Sciences Informatics (IAHSI), and one of only five from Australia.
The body will serve as an international forum for peers in the field, contributing to national and global eHealth policy and the adoption of health informatics across all nations to help achieve the WHO Sustainable Development Goals.
Health informatics, also called biomedical informatics, is a multidisciplinary field that uses various informatics tools to advance healthcare.
Professor Liaw – sometimes described by colleagues as a clinical informatician masquerading as a general practitioner – said the group would focus thought leadership in the field.
“I feel extraordinarily privileged as many in this inaugural class of the IAHSI include health informatics pioneers and innovators whose research and educational expertise I have admired and learned so much from for the past two decades,” he said.
“More importantly, I feel an added responsibility to lead the discipline to further academic and practical achievements and greater recognition.”
The group of internationally recognised experts in health informatics science, research, education and implementation will add to the knowledge base globally and in Australia.
Professor Liaw, who is also Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for eHealth, said he looks forward to robust discourse on “the science and art” of health informatics.
“This will further strengthen and consolidate its credentials as an academic discipline as well as a practical inter-disciplinary science,” he said.
“We will share knowledge and implementation globally, to innovate and sustain eHealth with local requirements and contexts. We are already doing this informally, through bilateral relationships with specific countries.
“Importantly, our knowledge exchange activities are formally conducted through the WHO Collaborating Centre for eHealth, which is hosted by UNSW Medicine (School of Public Health & Community Medicine).”