Steven McPhail
Centre Director/Strength Lead – Health Economics and Program Lead – Digital Health
Steve is an internationally renowned health service innovator, health economist, clinician and researcher and leads the health management discipline at the Queensland University of Technology. He is also the Flagship Research & Education Director (Intelligent Decision Support) for the Digital Health Cooperative Research Centre and co-Director for the Centre of Healthcare Transformation.
Steve’s specialist areas of knowledge include: health economics; digital health; health services research methodologies; cost-effectiveness; decision making; decision support; high value and low value healthcare; patient-reported outcomes; staff capacity building in health services; digital disruption in healthcare; fall prevention and patient safety; frailty; health-related behaviour change interventions; trauma care among vulnerable people; multidisciplinary models of care and the impact of chronic disease and multimorbidity.
Steve’s major focus is working in partnerships within and across health services and government jurisdictions to help design, implement and evaluate effective model of care or system changes that improve patient care at low cost, or with cost savings. This includes identification and disinvestment from interventions that provide no benefit, or are potentially harmful to patients.
Steven McPhail has been awarded more than $100 million in research funding in the past 10 years, primarily from international and national competitive schemes. He has been fortunate to receive consecutive fellowship support from the National Health & Medical Research Council and Medical Research Futures Fund for the duration of his research career to date, for which he is very grateful. He has made research contributions of international significance, with 200+ publications in high-quality peer reviewed journals including in Lancet, JAMA, BMJ, and Nature journal suites, among others.
His work has been cited in policy-related documents from the World Bank and World Health Organisation. Interventions, patient assessment procedures, decision support tools, and clinical care models he has developed or evaluated have led to changes in more than 100 health services on 6 continents.
As a health economist and clinician, he received his PhD in Health Economics from The University of Queensland, and has since spent more than a decade working collaboratively in strong multidisciplinary teams that bridge the divide between health service, industry and academic sectors. He is the Professor of Health Services Research and leads the Health Management discipline at the Queensland University of Technology.
