Lorna Hobbs reports on the UCL symposium ‘e-Health: Building the UCL Community’, held on 22 November.

Early terminations have been linked to breast cancer, and young people with severe mental illnesses are three times more likely to die from cardiovascular disease than the general population. These are just two examples of findings that were discovered through the linkage of electronic health records in the National Health Service.

E-health is an emerging field that involves the use of new information and communication technology to improve health and healthcare. All healthcare systems currently face numerous problems as a result of ageing populations, an increase in the prevalence of long term conditions, rising costs of healthcare and rising expectations from populations. E-health is seen as one solution to these problems, and has the potential to profoundly affect the organisation and delivery of health services.

On 22 November UCL held ‘e-Health: Building the UCL Community’. The symposium brought together UCL’s vast interdisciplinary expertise (including academics in clinical medicine, psychology, sociology, health informatics, human-computer interaction, computational science, computer science, and engineering to name but a few) with a view to fuelling future collaborations and strengthening UCL’s standing as a research centre in the area of e-Health.

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