Maria Inacio

A/Prof Inacio is an epidemiologist with research interests in the areas of population health surveillance systems (e.g. registries) and utilisation of existing data and informatics to enhance these systems. She is the Director of the Registry of Senior Australians (ROSA) at SAHMRI and a Hospital Research Foundation Mid-Career Fellow and NHMRC Emerging Leadership 2 Fellow. ROSA is a SA-based Clinical Quality Registry developed to support the monitoring and evaluation of the quality of ageing and aged care services provided to older Australians. A/Prof Inacio’s work has the goal of identifying good models of care, areas in need of improvement, risk factors for poor health outcomes, and opportunities to improve health and wellbeing of older Australians accessing aged 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. Her work there was awarded the prestigious US Orthopaedic Research and Education Foundation Clinical Research Award in 2018. Since 2017 A/Prof Inacio has developed the ROSA research program and team, which has resulted in significant contributions to the understanding of the individuals in the aged care sector nationally and how quality and safety of care can be efficiently monitored for this sector. A/Prof Inacio and the ROSA team have delivered several reports to the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety and already been translated into federal level recommendations regarding quality and safety monitoring for the aged care sector.

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. She is also an editor for the Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research journal since 2014 and is a current Associate Member (mentee) of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences.  In her career, she has also been awarded $8 million in research funding (including grants as CIA from NHMRC and MRFF), published over 145 scientific articles, and been awarded several institutional (2019 SAHMRI Research Translation, Diane Ranck Leadership, and Mid-Career Awards) and national (2020 Information Technology in Aged Care Award, 2020 SA Young Tall Poppy Science Award) awards.