I’m Professor of Surgery and Data Science at the University of Edinburgh and Consultant Surgeon at the Royal Infirmary. I’m Director of the Centre for Medical Informatics at the Usher Institute and lead the Surgical Informatics group . Our work is been funded by the NIHR, Wellcome Trust, MRC, and Academy of Medical Sciences.
My interests include crowd-sourcing patient-level data; surgical trials in low resource settings; mobile data collection platforms and “wearables”; automated data processing and display; natural language processing/sentiment analysis; decision modelling; Bayesian statistics; administrative data analysis; and patient reported outcomes.
I jointly lead the GlobalSurg Collaborative, an international collaboration of 5000 individuals across 100 countries studying outcomes in general surgery and quality improvement.
I am Programme Director for the Masters in Surgery degree and Year 6 Module Lead for Surgery at the University of Edinburgh. This distance-learning qualification allows surgeons to train while continuing to work in their home country. A number of surgeons in low and middle income countries are benefiting from this programme. Our group run the successful HealthyR Training Course.
We are currently running the Tracking Wound Infection Using Smartphone Technology (TWIST) Study, where we use SMS text messaging and patient-taken wound photographs to see if we can shorten the time to the diagnosis and treatment of wound infection.
