As the first virtual hospital in NSW, RPA Virtual Hospital (rpavirtual) plays a lead role in developing evidence for innovative, effective, and sustainable models of virtual care through high quality research and evaluation at the service level and/or through partnerships with other relevant services, tertiary institutions, and medical and health research centres. 

Since its inception, rpavirtual has developed a significant research agenda and has several current research and evaluation projects across all disciplines. These include clinical trials, patient and clinician experience and qualitative research and evaluation studies.

The RPA Virtual Hospital Research Steering Committee (established May 2020) provides overarching governance. The Committee meets monthly and is co-chaired by the SLHD Chief Executive and District Director of Research. All rpavirtual research studies are reviewed by the Committee. Membership is comprehensive and includes members of rpavirtual Executive, Clinical Directors and key research partners.

rpavirtual is also represented as investigators or committee members on the national Digital Health Clinical Research Centre, the Centre of Research Excellence for Integrated Health, and Sydney Health Partners Virtual Care Clinical Academic Group.

Areas for research have focused on building the evidence of delivering virtual care by conducting clinical trials; demonstrating the viability and financial sustainability of rpavirtual by conducting health economic evaluation of virtual clinical programs; better understanding the patients and clinician experience with virtual care through qualitative studies; evaluation studies for new models of care; and investigating research opportunities using existing datasets.
 

Our Research Partnerships

rpavirtual has strengthened its research capability through the establishment of a Research Hub that includes a mixture of permanent and temporary funded positions and the through the establishment of strong collaborative research partnerships. Research relationships have been established with the following partners:

• Menzies Centre for Health Policy and Economics, University of Sydney
• RPA Green Light Institute for Emergency Care
• Institute for Musculoskeletal Health
• RPA Institute for Academic Surgery
• Digital Health Cooperative Research Centre, University of Sydney
• Sydney School of Health Sciences, University of Sydney
• Centre for Primary Health Care and Equity, University of New South Wales
• Centre for Health Informatics, Macquarie University.