Dr Maria Alejandra Piñero de Plaza is a health systems researcher and implementation scientist who helps teams address a common problem in health innovation: promising ideas often work in pilots but struggle to become useful, equitable, and sustainable in real-world systems. Her work sits at the intersection of implementation science, caring science, digital health, AI-enabled evaluation, consumer engagement, and health equity. She is a Research Fellow at the Caring Futures Institute, Flinders University, and an Adjunct Fellow at the Adelaide Medical School, The University of Adelaide.

She works best with complex problems where evidence, people, technology, services, and policy interact. Her methodological work includes PROLIFERATE and PROLIFERATE_AI, decision-intelligence frameworks that integrate implementation science, realist evaluation, participatory methods, Bayesian modelling, Monte Carlo simulation, expert elicitation, and computational modelling. These frameworks help collaborators move beyond a simple question, “Does it work?”, toward more useful implementation questions: Who does it work for, under what conditions, through which mechanisms, with what trade-offs, and with what unintended consequences?

She brings evidence of delivery across research, policy, and implementation. Her work has contributed to more than A$2.67 million in competitive and government-funded projects, with evaluations informing state-level models of care, national policy discussions, and real-world implementation across cardiac rehabilitation, emergency cardiac care, virtual care, AI implementation, and priority populations. This includes the Country Heart Attack Prevention Project, which contributed to translating flexible cardiac rehabilitation into South Australia’s Statewide Cardiac Rehabilitation Model of Care; RAPIDx AI, a multi-site program evaluating AI-enabled decision support in emergency cardiac care; Safe@Home, examining virtual care and telemonitoring for older adults; CREW, focused on cardiac rehabilitation for women; CR4ALL, focused on scaling cardiac rehabilitation for underserved populations; and the Frail, Homebound and Bedridden People program, which helped make visible the access needs of people who cannot easily attend care in person.

Her publications provide evidence across the areas in which she most often collaborates: consumer engagement in health policy, research and services; continuity of care for First Nations Peoples living with chronic disease; telehealth for homebound people; human-centred AI implementation in emergency cardiac care; care biography; and the Caring Life Course Theory. Across this work, she examines how health systems can better recognise lived experience, relational care, cultural continuity, care networks, and context as central to whether evidence becomes useful in practice.

As a partner, Dr Piñero de Plaza brings methodological depth, practical translation experience, and a collaborative approach to work. With a PhD in health promotion, behaviour, and health, and prior training in marketing science, journalism, anthropology, consumer behaviour, and applied AI and data science, she pays close attention to how people interact with health technologies, processes of change, information, services, and environments.

She holds a certificate in Applied AI and Data Science from MIT, and applies this training through a responsible, human-centred, and context-sensitive evaluation lens.

She has received the Women of Colour in STEM Healthcare Innovator Award, the CSIRO ON Prime Innovation Reward, research excellence awards from Flinders University, and Wiley Top Cited and Top Downloaded Article recognitions. She understands these achievements as part of collaborative work with research teams, consumers, clinicians, communities of practice, mentors, and partner organisations committed to improving care. Her broader profile is available through University of Adelaide Researcher Profiles, Flinders ResearchNow, ORCID, and LinkedIn.