Enhancing surveillance for cardiovascular disease in Australia

Enhancing surveillance for cardiovascular disease in Australia

Doctor Lee Nedkoff, University of Western Australia

Future Leader Fellowship - Level 2

Years funded: 2025 - 2028

Best-practice surveillance of cardiovascular disease (CVD) is essential for driving optimal health policy and CVD prevention and management. Monitoring of CVD burden, treatment and outcomes which is not evidence-based can lead to ineffective government policy and suboptimal health resource distribution.

The aim of my program is to optimise the surveillance of CVD in Australia by developing and implementing new methods for monitoring, and incorporating CVD conditions of emerging clinical interest such as cardiomyopathies and chronic coronary disease. There is changing clinical focus within CVD and a growing array of data sources and untested surveillance methods. This program will develop algorithms and standardised approaches to enhance methods for CVD monitoring and implement these to investigate the changing burden of CVD, with a focus on First Nations and rural disparities.

I will use an array of state and national linked datasets, supplemented by clinical data, to develop and test algorithms for monitoring chronic coronary disease (CCD) and cardiomyopathies, conditions of increasing clinical interest. Established indicators for measuring acute coronary syndromes and stroke will be optimised through validation and linked data methodological studies. I will utilise the algorithms developed for CCD to investigate the costs and effectiveness of CCD-related health interventions using a proportional multistate lifetable modelling approach.

Finally, I will develop an integrated, standardised framework for monitoring CVD conditions, including developing a dashboard intervention to embed CVD population measures, with a focus on First Nations and rural communities.