Consultant in Anaesthesia and Critical Care, University College London Hospital
Interests
I am a Consultant in Anaesthesia and Critical Care at University College Hospital London. For half the week, I work on the Critical Care Unit and in theatre, and for the other half, I work in small research group that tackles clinical research questions using electronic health records.
Research
We use observational clinical datasets to answer questions about treatment efficacy that cannot be addressed experimentally (via randomised controlled trials). We also lead on a new collaboration between five teaching hospitals to share the electronic health records from critical care - Health Informatics Collaborative.
Within the arena of clinical observational research, there is little recognition of the issues of good research programming practice despite the widespread reliance on electronic data. We have started to try and generate a culture of reproducible data analysis using standardised tools. For example,within the context of one clinical trial, we converted from proprietary databases to a mixture of YAML dictionaries, validation tools coded in Python, and a locally hosted MySQL database. The code is available on Github, and has been shared between several internal projects.
Check out contributions by and mentions of Steve Harris on www.software.ac.uk