Contributors

Dr Marcus Baw

"I'm a self-taught software developer, so you are almost certainly better than me."

Dr Marcus Baw is a GP in North Yorkshire, which is in the continent of Europe. He is a proud Yorkshireman. He is a father, a guitarist, and a mountain biker, although not necessarily in that order.

He qualified in Medicine from the University of Liverpool in 2000 and spent around 10 years in acute hospital specialities (Emergency Medicine, Anaesthesia and ICU), mostly in the Liverpool and Manchester region, before deciding to change career paths and completing GP training in Wigan in 2011.

Somewhere between programming and clinical medicine exists a nebulous area called Clinical Informatics. He was the Chair of the RCGP Health Informatics Group throughout the COVID pandemic (2019-2022) and is a Fellow of the Faculty of Clinical Informatics.

Since beginning work in health technology over ten years ago, Dr Baw has struggled with how to create an interoperable and portable health record.

Though much work already exists regarding health interoperability, he sadly concluded that all of it is misguided. The decision to adopt databases for the content of health records was wrong. It has resulted in chaos across health tech, with vast sums of money wasted and un-interoperable records.

Throughout his health informatics career, Dr Baw has learned as much as possible about how existing tech solutions can benefit the health tech space.