Iain Buchan

Overview

Iain Buchan is Clinical Professor in Public Health Informatics at the University of Manchester, where he founded and leads the Centre for Health Informatics.

He also directs the MRC Health eResearch Centre (www.herc.ac.uk) and co-directs the national Farr Institute for Health Informatics Research (www.farrinstitute.org).

For Manchester''s Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health he is Domain Director for Population Health and Ecosystems, and for the Greater Manchester Combined Authority he is Director of Civic Analytics.

For the NHS and Public Health Service, Iain is Honorary Consultant at Public Health England, NICE and Salford Royal Foundation Trust.

His research and innovation work centres on harnessing large-scale, population-based health data to scale-up and speed-up scientific research and (public) health service development in tandem.

Biography

Iain’s career has combined data-intensive scientific, medical, public health and technology work for over 25 years.

From the outset, he studied statistics and software engineering alongside medicine, anticipating a more data-intensive healthcare future. While still an undergraduate he published the first version of a statistical package (www.statsdirect.com), which now has over twenty thousand users world-wide.

As a junior doctor, he recognised clinical workflows between primary and secondary care as the main disconnect in the UK’s National Health Service and in other parts of the world. So, he built and researched information systems that paved the way for today’s computable clinical guidelines.

He then trained as a public health physician while continuing medical informatics research in Cambridge, before combining the ‘digital’ and ‘health’ parts of his career in an academic post at Manchester in 2003.

Over the past thirteen years at Manchester Iain has raised around £100M in research grants and built the UK’s most productive health informatics research team. In 2013 his team was awarded MRC Centre status – the Health e-Research Centre (www.herc.ac.uk). Building on this award, he has worked with other MRC Centre Directors to form the UK’s national Farr Institute for Health Informatics Research (www.farrinstitute.org), which he now co-directs.

Internationally, he is a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics and works via the International Medical Informatics Association, WHO and other global networks to pursue a larger scale of health data sharing and analytics that will better serve public health, science and industry.