Summary of the MRC / NHS Digital Roadshow, York, Jan 2018

It’s now been six months since I switched from maths to healthcare (Wow, time goes fast!) and I’m starting to understand the bigger picture of funding bodies, legislative restrictions, and government-affiliated organisations in the area.

Two of these bodies are the MRC (Medical Research Council) and NHS Digital (owners of most secondary care datasets), so I was keen to attend their “roadshow” event in York. The event outlined some of the major upcoming changes to the healthcare domain over the next few years, mainly arising from the EUs data protection law, GDPR. I’ve summarised some of the key points below whilst the slides from the event can be found here.

I managed to stock up on Betty’s tea whilst in York

A Crash Course in Health Analytics

As some of you might know, I recently made a (fairly large) career change. I’m now a Research Fellow in Health Data Analytics at The University of Leeds, UK. Since I’m coming from a maths/HPC background and have almost no prior knowledge of healthcare I’ve had a bit of catching up to do! Overall I’m aiming to apply machine learning and large-scale data analysis to large datasets arising from health and socio-economic domains, where my skills in linear algebra and HPC will undoubtedly become useful.

In this post I aim to summarise what I’ve learned in my first few weeks on the job. This is partly to archive things for myself but should also be interesting reading for anyone who wants to get involved with health data. I’ll touch upon

• the legal issues arising from using private data,
• interesting talks and papers that I’ve found, and,
• some recurring opinions on the future challenges in the field.