Health Sciences Information Group
Dr D Bawden (Director), Prof J Weinberg , Dr I Rowlands , Dr G Lewison (Wellcome Trust and Visiting Professor), Dr B Webster (Research Fellow), Ms J Mani-Saada (RA)
HSIG provides a focus for research relevant to the provision of healthcare, and to the basic sciences that underlie it. HSIG carries out research, consultancy and scholarship in the application of information and knowledge management; information policy analysis and knowledge structures to healthcare provision, and to the sciences which support such provision.
Current interests of HSIG include: health information for professionals and consumers; Internet applications; surveillance and monitoring; evidence-based practice; pharmaceutical information; information needs of midwives and psychiatric nurses; veterinary information; bioinformatics; and information for evidence-based practice.
The Group is currently undertaking research in two major areas: the National Electronic Library for Communicable Disease (NeLCD) - a 'virtual branch library' for the National Electronic Library for Health comprising research into user needs, scope and methods of delivery - and the Wellcome Trust’s Research Outputs Database (ROD). The ROD contract (c. £450K) was won in open competition with top UK Universities to develop and exploit a large-scale database which has been designed to create innovative policy-relevant indicators relating to the funding, productivity and impact of UK biomedical research. ROD is a dataset of national significance that models and summarises the performance of the UK health science base. The Austrian Ministry for Arts, Science and Culture has commissioned a (£100K) study of the funding of Austrian biomedical research, 1990-1999 using ROD methodology. The digital health work of the ISRG involves members of the HSIG