Health systems are under immense pressure from the growing burden of chronic disease and with the increasing costs of healthcare are in danger of becoming unsustainable. Emerging and legacy technologies can both enable innovative models of care or detrimentally entrench existing practices.
Addressing these issues is about more than the clinical management of patients. Health systems research has a critical role in addressing this problem by helping to identify affordable and innovative models of healthcare for the treatment and management of chronic disease. This is also consistent with the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) identification of the need for long term system wide reform in the healthcare sector.