Enrico Coiera
Professor of Medical Informatics
 

Professor Coiera is an internationally recognised research leader in digital health and health systems science. He has a long reputation for opening up new avenues of research in his field, allowing others to follow and extend his work. He first made his reputation in the mid 1990s when he was arguable the first scientist in his field internationally to identify the huge potential of the world wide web for health service transformation, through a series of seminal papers in the British Medical Journal. His ground-breaking research into clinical communication for the first time outlined the interruptive, multitasking nature of clinical work and its implications for patient safety and technology design. He is a co-author of the seminal paper in digital health safety, published in the lead journal JAMIA in 2003, and which now is the highest cited paper in that journal of all time. His 30 year career includes a decade in the Hewlett-Packard Research Labs in Bristol, where he led research and development programs in clinical communication, intelligent patient monitoring, and the anaesthesia workstation project.

He is a highly influential commentator on national e-health strategies, advocating strongly for rational policymaking based upon sound evidence. His work has translated into policy and practice changes for e-health safety, multiple patented inventions, and a US-based consumer e-health start up company. He is author of one of the earliest textbooks on health informatics, now in its 3rd edition, widely used internationally, translated into several languages, and the receiver of an award by the British Medical Association.

In 2015 Professor Coiera won the highest international award for digital health, the IMIA Francois Gremy Award of Excellence. He was the founding president of the Australian College of Health Informatics in 2001, the first Australian Fellow of the American Medical Informatics Association and the first non-US Associate editor of the peak Journal of American Medical Informatics Association, a position he held for over ten years. He has also been on the editorial board of numerous international health informatics journals and held positions on national and international councils and associations.

In 2000 he founded the Centre for Health Informatics, which is now Australia’s first, longest running and most successful digital health research organisation. With 11000 citations, he has an H-index of 53 in Google scholar; 27 of these publications have more than 100 citations, 7 more than 300 and one is over 1600. He has over 260 journal articles, books, chapters, and conference presentations.