2021 Brilliant women in Digital Health – Karin Verspoor and Farah Magrabi

AAAiH congratulates Professor Karin Verspoor and Associate Professor Farah Magrabi for being recognised in the Telstra Health’s 2021 Brilliant Women in Digital Health Awards.

In its inaugural year, the 2021 Brilliant Women in Digital Health award initiative set out to recognise and celebrate women in digital health for their outstanding achievements, while raising awareness about the opportunities in the sector and inspiring others to follow their lead.

Professor Karin Verspoor has been recognised for her contribution to technology development, as a computer and data scientist, with specific expertise in artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing. In collaboration with a myriad of health organisations and clinicians, Professor Verspoor’s work focuses on using her computational skills to transform biomedical data into actionable information, to help biomedical researchers find and organise information and knowledge, and to help solve problems in biomedicine and health that need AI. A Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Digital Health, Professor Verspoor’s contributions are in developing inter-disciplinary and inter-generational collaborations creating impactful digital health innovations.

Professor Karin Verspoor has played a key role on the Executive of the Australian Alliance for Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare (AAAiH) in setting the strategic direction and ongoing leadership. Karin is also the Victorian State Hub lead of AAAiH.

Associate Professor Farah Magrabi has been recognised for her outstanding contribution to health and medical research by globally pioneering the study of the patient safety risks of digital health. With a background in Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Associate Professor Magrabi’s research focuses on the design and evaluation of digital health and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies for clinicians and consumers. She has both helped establish digital health safety as an area of research through a series of foundational papers, and translated that research into international guidelines, directly shaping policy and practice in digital health implementation. Most significantly, her work has developed a new safety classification for healthcare IT, which has been adopted into a global practice guideline by the International Organisation for Standardisation.

Associate Professor Farah Magrabi co-chairs the Safety, Quality and Ethics Working Group of AAAiH and has played a key role in developing AAAiH’s Safety, Quality and Ethics strategic direction.