Course summary

Advances in data capture platforms in both medicine and life sciences supported by modern computing and informatics have greatly energised the overlapping fields of Medical Informatics and Data Intensive Biomedicine. The Centre For Medical Informatics at the Usher Institute of Population Health Sciences and Informatics was inaugurated at Edinburgh on 1 April 2015 (Harvard Medical School also establishing a department of Biomedical Informatics in 2015). The combination of informatics and biomedicine is fundamental for advances towards 4P medicine (personalised, predictive, preventive, and participatory). Current research opportunities in this area include:

• Developing new perspectives on medicine and fundamental biology through application of quantitative approaches and data-intensive analyses to biomedical and other health related data

• Real-time generation, analysis and interpretation of health data to foster the creation of learning health systems, which aim to enhance the quality, safety and efficiency of care

• The development of new challenges for informatics systems (software, hardware and socio-technical) in healthcare and medicine

• Developing and evaluating new technologies to promote health and wellbeing

• To study and inform policy deliberations on strategies and approaches to digitising health systems and services

• Safe and secure management and storage of digitised data in ways that enables secondary uses of these data

• Social, ethical and legal issues of data intensive research and digitised health care