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Health Informatics

We are transforming health research with cutting-edge digital technology and data science. Our work enables discoveries that improve people’s lives and enhance public health. Our growing multidisciplinary team brings together specialists in computer science, bioinformatics and clinical research to deliver digital tools and services that empower researchers and clinicians to make a real-world impact. Key areas of focus are:

Leadership in data

Data drives our ability to understand, diagnose, manage, analyse, and predict health outcomes. Our teams specialise in many different aspects of data management but especially in the development of methods and the application of in-depth know-how to ensure data can be safely used in healthcare. We focus on the following domains: 

  • Providing expertise in clinical coding to convert data into actionable phenotypes

  • Software tooling that accelerates the adoption of standards 

  • Privacy by design approaches to data management 

  • FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) approaches to data to enable analyses between domains to enable richer data to be used in research that maintains safety and security.  

Delivering advanced analytics and Artificial Intelligence

Our research aims at delivering AI and advanced solutions to help with both addressing challenging data-driven medical problems and to enhance performance of FAIR digital infrastructures and federated technologies. We focus on the following domains:

  • Big data in healthcare for risk prediction, disease progression and prevention;

  • AI underpinning biomaterials for medical devices discovery, including development of tools for quantitative structure activity relationships and generative models;

  • Machine learning tools for medical image registration and segmentation;

  • Natural language processing tools (including LLMs) to support converting medical data into standardised OMOP terms for cohort discovery and FAIR data.  

  • Biomedical text analytics for analysing and extracting valuable information from unstructured biomedical text data.

Pioneering Federated technologies 

Data is vital to drive insights into health but often it is not possible to bring all the data into a single location. Our teams are leading international programmes that seek to understand how we can analyse data when it operates across multiple existing environments and in particular where the data is held in secure data environments. 

  • Researching the mechanisms to adopt international standards from OHDSI, ELIXIR and GA4GH – and provide user-friendly tools for data scientists to easily access and use these standards, putting FAIR data at the fingertips of health data researchers. 

  • Assisting in the extraction of data from General Practices across the UK, bringing in our expertise in clinical coding 

  • Developing rich international collaborations so we can learn and develop understanding across multiple healthcare systems

  • Researching between what is technically possible, what is acceptable to the public and governance teams and what is useful to researchers.