New appointment to lead innovation through clinical research

Professor Tom Snelling, a clinical academic, has been jointly appointed at Sydney School of Public Health and the Children’s Hospital at Westmead as an infectious diseases physician and will head the new Health and Clinical Analytics team.

The Health and Clinical Analytics team at the University of Sydney aims to directly improve healthcare by establishing learning health systems. This partnership with clinicians, researchers and the community uses causal models to understand disease, and embeds research in routine healthcare, allowing the team to conduct innovative and adaptive clinical trials.

Most recently, the team has been working closely with other academic institutions and the Digital Health CRC to establish a national COVID-19 Clinical Data Analytics Platform (CDAP) which will capture and organise clinical data from patients with COVID-19. This work will help frontline clinicians and healthcare workers understand who is at risk of severe disease and which treatments result in the best outcomes. The platform will also support other initiatives including the development of clinical decision support tools using artificial intelligence and several trials assessing different treatments for COVID-19.  

“There’s great potential for healthcare-embedded research in Australia.  Our team’s focus is to use a learning health systems approach for COVID-19 so that we are able to learn from every patient in near real time. This is especially important for COVID-19 as there are still many unknowns about how to best manage patients,” says Professor Snelling. 

“Professor Snelling’s work shows us that entirely new approaches to clinical research may accelerate the pace at which improvements in healthcare are delivered. We are delighted that Tom has re-joined the University of Sydney and I am so pleased to see him establishing collaborations across the University,” says Executive Dean of the Faculty of Medicine and Health, Professor Robyn Ward.

Professor Snelling was previously the director of the Wesfarmers Centre of Vaccines and Infectious Diseases at the Telethon Kids Institute in Perth. There he established a cross-disciplinary team committed to improving health through innovative approaches to healthcare research and evaluation.