Health informatics Q&A, with Dr Mo Osman

We are delighted to welcome Dr Mo Osman to the team as BRC Informatics Fellow. His role is brand new and reflects the rapidly growing trend in healthcare and research, to understand more about electronic patient records and the wealth of information that data can bring.

We caught up with him as he starts his time with us, to find out more about his background, and where he plans to take his new role.

What has your career path been like so far?

I graduated from Medicine in 2018 from St. George’s, University of London. Since then I have been working as a junior doctor in University Hospitals Sussex, across a variety of specialties. I now join the NIHR Newcastle BRC as an Informatics Fellow, working with the AGE research group.

You have come to this role from a clinical background; how do you feel your experience with patients will help you?

During my time in clinical medicine, I spent a significant period working in Elderly Care departments. I therefore have worked with many patients who have suffered from loss of physical function and loss of independence. I hope that my experience of working with this patient group will allow me to work with others to deliver research that is relevant to the needs of the ageing population with particular emphasis on quality of life.

What is it that made you want to move into Informatics Research?

Informatics Research is a rapidly developing field that will have increasing application in Medicine. The healthcare data that exists is a huge resource and I believe that with Information Technology, we can tap into this resource to learn how we can improve patient care and outcomes.

What areas of research are you going to be working on and why are they important?

My projects for the year will include a systematic review on the use of Natural Language Processing. This will hopefully identify ageing syndromes in electronic healthcare records. Later in the year, I will also be working on developing a Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithm. With this I hope to identify patients with sarcopenia and physical frailty from electronic healthcare records. If successful, this would function as a useful screening tool to identify patients with these conditions.

How do you see your role developing?

I believe that the field of healthcare informatics will continue to grow and become increasingly important as healthcare data transitions to a digital platform. There is already a lot of exciting health informatics initiatives taking place in Newcastle but I see huge potential for it to help the Newcastle BRC deliver real impact for patients.