Our research on clinical text mining, processing patient generated data and building interoperable clinical data processing infrastructures is part of a new multimillion-pound centre of excellence in that has been awarded to a consortium led by The University of Manchester. The consortium brings together partners from academia, the NHS, local authorities and industry in a five to 10-year programme. The Medical Research Council (MRC), along with nine other government and charity funders, 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.

One of the main objectives is to enable different research teams to collaborate across different organisations to produce more powerful and timely analyses of anonymised healthcare records. The aim is to combine clinical, social and research data to identify more effective treatments, improve drug safety, assess risks to public health and study the causes of diseases and disability. The Centre will make use of patient data sets available through the Clinical Practice Research Datalink, a £60 million service recently announced by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency and the National Institute for Health Research. The centre is led by Prof Iain Buchan, and Dr Goran Nenadic is one of CI, co-leading the development of CHIP-SET (Community Health Intelligence Partnership – Semantic Epidemiology Toolkit) along with Prof Carole Goble and John Ainsworth, in particular in the area of text mining and overall bio-health informatics input.