Simulation based training

Chris Paton's work around the LIFE project offers simulation based training in low income countries and is aimed at saving lives through innovative use of smartphones and mobile devices.

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Global health informatics

In a learning health system, health care providers use electronic health records to identify problems, implement local solutions and check if the solutions are effective. Health informatics, or the use of IT in healthcare, needs to find innovative solutions for low income settings, such as the use of open-source softwares and mobile technology. This approach has been used to deliver training to rural healthcare workers in Kenya.

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Dr Chris Paton is the Head of the Global Health Informatics Group at the University of Oxford. His research group investigates how new digital health technologies such as electronic health records (EHRs), mHealth apps, and new machine learning techniques can be used to improve healthcare.

Following his training as a medical doctor in the UK, he moved into Clinical Informatics and worked as a Senior Research Fellow at the National Institute for Health Innovation in New Zealand before returning to the UK to join the University of Oxford. He received his Fellowship of the UK Faculty of Clinical Informatics in 2018 and became an Official Fellow of Parks College, Oxford in 2019.

He is the Principal Investigator for the LIFE (Life-saving Instruction for Emergencies) project. LIFE is a smartphone-based simulation training platform that uses a virtual hospital. environment to simulate medical emergencies to train healthcare workers. Launched in April 2019, LIFE has now been downloaded by thousands of healthcare workers in Africa and Dr Paton is now leading a clinical trial of the platform in Kenya funded by GCRF. See here for a BBC interview about the project.

Dr Paton collaborates on several large-scale international projects including NEST360, a £50 million initiative that aims to deliver new technologies and training to improve neonatal care in Africa and a new Wellcome Trust Innovation Flagship in Vietnam that will develop and implement a range of new AI-based monitoring devices in intensive care units (ICUs) in South-East Asia.

He currently supervises 3 DPhil students at the University of Oxford with Professor Niall Winters in the Department of Education and Professor Mike English at the Nuffield Department of Medicine. He also lectures and supervises students for the MSc in International Health and Tropical Medicine.

Dr Paton has served as a digital health consultant the New Zealand Government and the Pathways for Prosperity Commission. He co-founded and chaired the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) social media working group and is currently co-chair of the IMIA open source working group. He is Associate Editor of “Digital Health Journal” (Sage Publishing) and “BMC: Medical Informatics and Decision Making”. He is a peer reviewer on digital health topics for scientific journals including Nature, PLOS One, JAMIA, JMIR, ANZJPH and serves as an expert grant reviewer for the UK’s Medical Research Council, the Research Council of Norway. He is also the Founder and Editor of the Health Informatics Forum, an online professional learning community that offers free courses, seminars and online discussion with a membership of over 11,000 health informatics professionals around the world.