Dr Sundresan Naicker

Biography

I am a Senior Research Fellow in implementation science and digital health at the Australian Centre for Health Services Innovation (AusHSI). My research focuses on how evidence-informed innovations can be successfully translated into complex health systems, with particular interests in digital health and artificial intelligence, integrated care, cancer prevention and chronic disease management.

At its core, my research uses implementation science and health services research to study how health systems function and how they can be improved. I examine how clinical practice, organisational structures, technologies, models of care and the wider service environment interact to shape healthcare delivery. I am particularly interested in identifying the conditions that enable effective system change and using this knowledge to design, implement and evaluate strategies that improve how services are organised, delivered and sustained in routine practice.

My work is strongly applied and undertaken in partnership with health services, clinicians, policymakers, industry and community organisations. I use a range of approaches, including pragmatic trials, theory-informed implementation studies, mixed-methods and realist evaluation, and co-design, to understand implementation readiness, contextual adaptation and the effects of change across different levels of the health system. My research has spanned digital clinical decision support and AI-enabled care, integrated and multidisciplinary models of care, cancer services and chronic disease management, with projects across hospital and community settings.

A consistent aim across this work is to generate knowledge that can be acted on: not simply whether a technology, intervention or model of care is effective, but how it can be integrated into existing systems, how services need to change around it, and how those changes can be sustained and scaled. I am also committed to developing implementation science capability through supervision and mentoring, and welcome enquiries from prospective students and collaborators interested in implementation science, digital health and AI, health service innovation, integrated care and complex system change.