Adelaide research unit fights healthcare’s dodgy problem
Professor Zachary Munn’s rapidly expanding team specialises in ensuring patients receive evidence-based care and, in doing so, is also calling out dodgy research.
During a research role early in his career, Professor Zachary Munn realised not all intervention healthcare treatments had a solid basis for their application.
“Much of the time people are actually following or delivering healthcare that isn’t based on high-quality scientific research, or what we call trustworthy evidence,” Munn said.
That led Munn “down a rabbit hole” into research and science for the past fifteen-plus years, working to ensure people get the best treatments to improve health outcomes – and to him becoming the founding Director of Health Evidence Synthesis, Recommendations and Impact (HESRI) in the School of Public Health at The University of Adelaide.
In 2024, he was recognised as one of the InDaily 40 Under 40 alumni.
“Very roughly, only about half of the time people see the doctor or get treated in the hospital, are they actually getting the best recommended treatment or care?” he said.
“Thirty per cent of the time it’s actually care that’s not needed, [which] might be a scan or a test or a treatment … and about 10 per cent of the time [the treatment] might involve a medical error, or a drug with side effects, or a scan that is going to have negative impacts as well.”
Munn said he has been shocked by the numbers for a long time.
“I just want to do everything in my power to make sure people are actually getting the best care they can,” he said.
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HESRI was established two years ago and has grown to a team of 12 people, more than doubling in size over the past year alone.
In lay terms, their work involves extensive reading and critiquing of scientific papers, searching for and identifying the good papers from the bad, and checking that experiments were run correctly.
“At barbecues, we have special skills in calling bullshit in scientific research,” Munn said.
“There’s a lot of dodgy research out there – obviously, a lot of fake news, a lot of influencers peddling treatments which are all largely rubbish – and one of our skills is actually identifying and finding what we can trust, what we should be doing and what [treatment] people should be receiving.”
The HESRI team’s versatility allows them to tackle diverse health challenges for Australian and global organisations – such as working with the World Health Organization on malaria prevention guidelines, or locally on hypertension in pregnancy guidelines.
Most recently, HESRI has received a $2 million grant from Fight MND to develop Australia’s first clinical care guideline for motor neuron disease (MND) to improve quality of life and symptom management.
The two-year project will bring together more than 100 people across Australia’s MND community, including researchers, health professionals, patients and carers to inform the guidelines, based on best available evidence and that is responsive to the needs of the MND community.
“For people who are living with MND, we’re focusing on making their lives better, essentially, so their outcomes aren’t so diabolical.”
The project launched with a kick-off event in April that brought key leaders in MND from across Australia to Adelaide.
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Munn believes it is “really important” that people living with a health condition and their carers are included in research efforts.
HESRI operates as an independent business within the University of Adelaide; its rapid expansion reflects growing demand for the team’s expertise, with funding coming from competitive research grants and consultancy agreements.
The choice of an Adelaide-based team for the MND project reflects the unit’s growing international reputation.
“I think it’s fantastic that Fight MND, which is one of the largest charities in motor neurone disease internationally, has decided to partner with a group in Adelaide to do this work,” Munn said.
“For them to come to Adelaide and fund this work, I think, speaks a lot to our group and The University of Adelaide – I can’t say enough how grateful and honoured I am.”
As in virtually every other sector, artificial intelligence is having an impact in the health sciences.
Munn called it a “double-edged sword”, presenting both opportunities and challenges for HESRI’s work: streamlining the development of trustworthy guidance, but also enabling the creation of fabricated studies.
“The problem is it’s being used in research and medicine to create fake studies and fake results,” Munn said.
“There are some issues with the integrity of what’s going on in the peer review literature based on completely fabricated data using AI.”
His team has encountered this problem firsthand, sometimes finding it difficult to distinguish genuine research from AI-generated fiction.
They now participate in international groups developing tools and checklists to detect fraudulent data in medical papers.
Munn is optimistic about the future.
“We feel like we’re at the cutting edge of this space internationally, and we’d like to see Adelaide and South Australia become world-renowned for good evidence to inform policy and practice.”
This year’s InDaily 40 Under 40 will be announced at the gala awards and networking event on Thursday, 19 June 2025.
