Kumara Mendis Biography 2013
Associate Professor Kumara Mendis has taken the role of Rural Health and Research
Academic and comes to us from the University of Sydney, School of Rural Health (SRH) in
Dubbo where he oversaw four specialty blocks in the Sydney Medical School program. His
primary speciality is General Practice and Kumara continues to practice in Narromine as a
rural GP for the past seven years. He has been involved in teaching of evidence based
medicine at the SRH, Sydney Medical School (Westmead and Central Clinical Schools) and
Broken Hill UDRH since 2007. Kumara's subspecialty is Medical Informatics. At the Bathurst
Rural Clinical School he will teach General Practice. Kumara will continue with his EBM
teaching at the UWS.
Kumara's main research interest is using Information and Communication Technologies
(ICT) to improve the quality of health care. His interest in electronic medical records,
evidence-based medicine, mobile phone SMS to control weight problems in young adult
males and web-based teaching learning methods directly relates to the use of ICT to
improve health care. Kumara's informatics research also includes the use of bibliometric
methods to evaluate and track how health care specialities such as general practice, medical
informatics, rural health performance. In addition he has used bibliometric analysis to track
health and medical research funding in Australia.