Maria Inacio

A/Prof Inacio is an epidemiologist with research interests in the areas of population health surveillance systems (i.e. 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. 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. She led the development of the largest US Anterior Cruciate Ligament Reconstruction Registry, the Kaiser Permanente Hip Fracture Registry, and conducted research on leveraging administrative, electronic medical record data, and informatics for population surveillance.

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 and a current Associate Member (mentee) of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences.  In her career, she has received the prestigious US Orthopaedic Research and Education Foundation (OREF) Clinical Research Award for a project she co-led, 3 national and 4 international conference awards and 2 prizes.