Electronic health research centre awarded to Manchester

The Medical Research Council announced today (Thursday) that the Health eResearch Centre (HeRC) will be set up in Manchester in partnership with the Universities of Lancaster, Liverpool and York.

HeRC will research new ways of harnessing electronic health data to improve care for patients and communities. The consortium brings together partners from academia, the NHS, local authorities and industry in a five to 10-year programme.

The Centre, led by Professor Iain Buchan, will produce new computer-based methods and tools, and apply them to five areas of innovation:

• Helping patients to monitor their own health in daily life using mobile technologies such as smartphones, alongside records shared with GPs;
• Helping the NHS to examine complex flows of patients in order to spot missed opportunities for earlier or better targeted care;
• Giving researchers more powerful tools for identifying sub-groups of people who have different patterns of health that might illuminate new targets for treatment or prevention;
• Enabling different research teams to collaborate across different organisations to produce more powerful and timely analyses of anonymised healthcare records;
• Making clinical trials more efficient and more relevant to patients.

In addition to generating world-leading methodology, HeRC will train a new cadre of professionals in the underpinning discipline of Health Informatics. The research councils are investing £4.5 million in HeRC over the next five years, and the total activity with investments from industry and academia will be around £18 million.

Three other e-health research centres will be established in London, Dundee and Swansea.