Maria Inacio

A/Prof Inacio is an epidemiologist with research interests in the areas of population health surveillance systems and utilisation of existing data and informatics to enhance these systems. Currently A/Prof Inacio’s work focuses on the surveillance of people accessing aged care services in Australia and their subsequent health care utilisation. This work has the goal of identifying good models of care, areas in need of improvement, factors leading to high health care utilisation, and opportunities to decrease unnecessary utilisation.  She is currently leading the development of the Registry of Older South Australians (ROSA) at SAHMRI, which will be the platform for efficient monitoring of Australians in aged care settings. In this role she is leading projects evaluating the epidemiology of aged care service utilisation in Australia from 1997 to the present and identifying differences in state utilisation of various aged care and health care services.

A/Prof Inacio was trained as an epidemiologist at the Dartmouth Centre for Evaluative Clinical Sciences (MS 2002) and University of California, San Diego (PhD 2013).  Between 2004-2015 A/Prof Inacio worked at Kaiser Permanente, the US largest integrated healthcare provider, in the development of orthopaedic registries. She led the development of the largest US Anterior Cruciate Ligament Reconstruction Registry (2005), which records 3,500 cases/year from 250 surgeons, and a Hip Fracture Registry (2013), which monitors cases from >2000 surgeons. At Kaiser Permanente, she led research on leveraging administrative, electronic medical record data, and informatics for population surveillance. This included the development of an infection surveillance algorithm and identification of health services encounters types and frequency association with early surgical failures. Between 2014-2016 A/Prof Inacio worked at UniSA where she led work on the utilisation of medications to monitor surgical populations, which resulted in 15 publications in 3 years. In 2017 she was appointed a Specialist Advisor for the Australian Government Therapeutics Goods Administration. In July 2017, she was appointed Director of the Healthy Ageing Research Consortium, and charged with the development of ROSA, which is currently underway and will contribute significantly to healthy ageing in South Australia. A/Prof Inacio has collaborators at several key institutions involved in registry and registry science including Kaiser Permanente in the US, Swedish Hip Register, Australian Orthopaedic Association National Joint Replacement Registry, and University of Melbourne SMART Registry. In her career, she has received a prestigious national US award and an organisation award for a project she co-lead, 3 national and 4 international conference awards and 2 prizes.