David Parry, Teaching Fellow in Health Informatics
Department of Information Science

Health Informatics - computing for doctors or something more ?

Over the last 10 years I have been involved in some way or another with
Health Informatics in a number of different guises. The most common
question remains - What is Health Informatics ? I hope that in
answering this question, by reference to the work I have been involved
in, some insights can be gained into the meaning of what is a
scientific discipline, and how Information and Computer science can
relate to real -world problems. Moreover I hope to show that the
distinction between "pure" and "applied" research is largely meaningless
for this domain.

Because of its nature as an essentially multidisciplinary field,
collaboration is at the heart of successful Health Informatics
research. This talk is intended to give an overview of where current
Health Informatics research is going both globally and locally, to
encourage people to think about how they could collaborate, and to
realise some of the vast range of possibilities in this field.