UCL Centre for Health Informatics & Multiprofessional Education

April 12^th 2013 witnessed a comparatively rare event in scholarly publishing, when Patient Safety, Law Policy and Practice was published in paperback by Routledge.

The British Medical Journal (BMJ) of April 24th 2013 includes an Editorial written by Dr Paul Taylor, Reader in  Health Informatics at UCL CHIME, discussing and summarising the new Information Governance Review known as "Caldicott 2", its background and implications.

UCL has, through CHIME, become a Partner in the European Connected Health Alliance, an initiative spanning government, healthcare, industry and academia that delivers leadership for the development of Connected and MHealth markets and practice across Europe and beyond.

One dark Thursday night in December saw Professor Dipak Kalra, Director of UCL CHIME, at home in front of a webcam, being interviewed online by American health informatician Tim Cook and taking live questions from around the world.

Dipak Kalra, clinical professor of health informatics and Director of UCL CHIME, has taken up the position of President of the EuroRec Institute, an independent not-for-profit organisation that promotes the use of high quality Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems across Europe.

In May 2012 the Director of UCL CHIME, Professor Dipak Kalra, joined other European and international academic, public health, industry, government and user representatives in Brussels to take forward the process of developing guidelines for trustworthy reuse of health data.

UCL CHIME is pleased to announce the conferment upon David Ingram of the title Emeritus Professor of Health Informatics at UCL, in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the University and to the discipline of health informatics.

Pippa Bark’s book, co-edited with John Tingle, a lawyer from Nottingham, has just been published by Routledge. (Link: Amazon)

UK trained doctors and medical students from minority ethnic groups tend to underperform academically compared with their white counterparts, according to a new study by UCL academics.

Vaccination is an effective way to prevent flu and minimise the spread of an epidemic or a pandemic. However, uptake of vaccination is often poor, as a team at UCL including CHIME's Dr Henry Potts have previously described in a study of the 2009 swine flu pandemic (Rubin, Potts & Michie, 2010, Health Tech Assessment, 14(34): 183-266).

Dr Carl Reynolds, who is currently studying for an MSc in Health Informatics at CHIME, and Prof. Jeremy Wyatt, who himself used to teach on the same MSc course, have co-written a paper just published in the Journal of Medical Informatics Research (J Med Internet Res 2011;13(1):e24).

A new paper in Informatics in Primary Care (Evaluation of a new short generic measure of health status: howRU, 2010; 18:89-101) describes the development and testing of a new generic tool for measuring health-related quality of life.

Don E. Detmer, Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and Visiting Professor at UCL CHIME, has been awarded the 2010 Morris F. Collen Award by the American Medical Informatics Association in recognition of his longstanding efforts to advance the field of biomedical and health informatics. 

The swine flu (influenza A H1N1v) pandemic of 2009 created considerable media coverage and some degree of public anxiety. Until a vaccine was developed, behavioural strategies by the general public were the main defence against further spread, so it was important that the public were well-informed about the pandemic and what they could do. Much concern was expressed at the time about the media, and indeed the Government, possibly sensationalising what was happening.

With a new Government reviewing Connecting for Health (CfH) and health IT policy more generally, a major evaluation of the Summary Care Record and HealthSpace, two key systems that CfH is charged to deliver, comes at the right time.

The latest issue of UK Health Informatics Today (UKHIT no 59, Winter 2009-10) is now available online.

In a new paper in the journal Pain (published online, doi:10.1016/j.pain.2009.12.011), Amanda Williams (UCL Research Department for Clinical, Education and Health Psychology) and Henry Potts (CHIME) describe how contextual factors can affect patient outcome in the setting of a specialist treatment centre for persistent pain.

Large-scale electronic patient record (EPR) programmes promise much but sometimes deliver little, according to a new study by researchers in CHIME and UCL's Department of Open Learning, that reviewed findings from hundreds of previous studies from all over the world.

Amy McKeown has presented her work on using computerised cognitive behavioural therapy (cCBT) preventatively at two international conferences recently. The work, done in collaboration with Dr Henry Potts, was based on her prize-winning MSc Health Informatics dissertation at CHIME. McKeown is now an honorary researcher in the department.

The academic year 2009-10 began in earnest on Friday October 2nd when no less than thirty new students on the health informatics programme arrived at UCL's Archway Campus to begin their induction programme.

A new book, Intelligent Engineering Systems and Computational Cybernetics, has been published. The book is a collection of recent research materials on very diverse topics in artificial intelligence, including medical applications.