Professor Connor is Head of the Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) Service at Liverpool Hospital in Sydney where she is a senior staff specialist and conjoint Professor with University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney, member of the Ingham Institute of Applied Medical Research as well as leading one of the South Western Sydney Local Health District Academic Units.
She did her medical degree (Hons 1) through UNSW, her Bachelor of Medical Science (UNSW) was in lactose malabsorption in Burmese village children, and her PhD also at UNSW in mucosal immunology in IBD.
Susan is currently on the Board of the IBD charity Crohn’s Colitis Cure and co-designer of the IBD Clinical Management Software (EMR), Crohn’s Colitis Care (CCCare) including the real-time Clinical Quality Registry (CQR) that lies behind it. Other past and present representation include Chair of the IBD Faculty within the Gastroenterological Society of Australia, committee member for Crohn’s & Colitis Australia, executive committee member for the ANZIBD Consortium, Australian Faculty for Cornerstones Health and Senior National Examiner for the Royal Australian College of Physicians.
Research focusses are all on IBD and most link back to E-Health through the CCCare clinician and patient facing EMR and its backend CQR. These include: 1. Value Based Health Care to understand and then address inequity of access and outcomes; 2. Development of Patient and clinician support tools using E-Health to improve quality of care and access of information; 3. Optimisation of patient and clinician communication including facilitation using CCCare; and 4. Addressing the road to cure of IBD through linkage via CCCare of biospecimens. Learnings from this research have wide applicability across healthcare as IBD is an exemplar complex chronic disease requiring lifelong therapy; it affects all age groups and prevalence is rising internationally.
