Professor Niranjan Bidargaddi

Niranjan Bidargaddi is a computer science engineer with over 20 years of experience leading digital health research and translating it into real-world health system change. He is the co-director of the Flinders Digital Health Research Centre and integrating AI in Mental Health Care flagship program leader at Health Translation SA. His work focuses on building and applying digital infrastructure for redistributing care work that enables health system to deliver care under workforce pressure. 

Digital systems are now determining demand for care, as well as how care is accessed and delivered by the health system. Niranjan’s work is based on the hypothesis that current digital infrastructures in health lack a final, critical layer: the ability to deliberately distribute care responsibilities across people (clinicians, patients, carers and community) and digital tools that support them. This includes shaping what information matters, who should act on it, and how those actions are supported, in ways that reflect skills, literacy, and lived experience and enable meaningful participation. By guiding these decisions through safety and values, rather than by what tools alone makes possible, this missing layer allows care work to be redistributed and augmented in ways that create capacity while reducing pressure and needless suffering on an already stretched clinical workforce.

His translational research reconfigures how care work is organised, starting from what clinicians and consumers would welcome handing over, and then puts in place the missing digital layers, governance and safeguards needed to support those shifts safely. This includes augmenting clinical capability and where appropriate shifting care decision tasks to consumers, carers, community services and community pharmacies where capacity exists, while maintaining oversight, accountability, and trust.

His research is integrative by design. It brings together technology, real-world healthcare practice, lived experience and regulatory insights into shared digital infrastructure that helps health services decide who should do which parts of care, and supports those decisions in practice. This infrastructure is designed to work across different stages of life and health needs, rather than being limited to a single disease area.

His outputs are embedded in live services and is designed to persist beyond individual projects. Current application areas he leads include hospital pharmacy and community mental health care sector, as well as strategically enabling partner-led initiatives where he provides shared infrastructure and digital health intellectual leadership in areas such as chronic pain, endometriosis, stroke, diabetes, sleep and liver health.