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Our podcast features Professor Aziz Sheikh at IGHPE 2018 in Kuala Lumpur. Prof. Sheikh discusses the ways health informatics is changing the health professional what today’s health professionals most need to understand about health informatics.

Prof. Sheikh is Professor of Primary Care Research & Development and Director of the Usher Institute of Population Health Sciences at The University of Edinburgh, where he is also Director of the NIHR Global Respiratory Health Unit (RESPIRE). He is Honorary Consultant in Paediatric Allergy at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Edinburgh, Director of the 16-university Asthma UK Centre for Applied Research, Director of the Scottish Allergy and Respiratory Academy, and Co-Director of the NHS Digital Academy, and holds visiting chairs at the University of Birmingham (UK), Queen Mary’s University of London (UK) and Maastricht University (the Netherlands). He is Co-Director of Harvard Medical School’s Safety, Quality, Informatics and Leadership (SQIL) Program.

Prof. Sheikh’s research interests include asthma/allergy, health inequalities and using health information technology to enhance the quality, safety and efficiency of health care. Together with colleagues across the world, he has produced more than 1,000 peer-reviewed publications. He is an editorial board member of PLOS Medicine, Medical Care, Health Informatics Journal and BMC Medicine, and is Editor-in-Chief of the Nature Partner Journal Primary Care Respiratory Medicine. He is Guest Editor of PLOS Medicine’s special collection on Machine Learning in Healthcare and Biomedicine and serves on The Lancet Commission on the Future of the NHS.

Beyond research, Prof. Sheikh serves on the Steering Group and as Chair of the Evaluation Group of the WHO’s Third Global Safety Challenge on Medication Safety as adviser to its Eastern Mediterranean Regional Office. He chairs the World Innovation Summit for Health (WISH) Forum on Data Science and Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare. Amongst many other honours, he was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for Services to Medicine and Healthcare in 2014, and is a fellow of eight learned societies. In 2017, Prof Sheikh was awarded the American Public Health Association’s Avenis Donabedian Quality Award and The University of Edinburgh’s Principal Medal for Exceptional Services. IGHPE was very happy indeed to have Prof. Sheikh presenting at our Kuala Lumpur meeting on the topic of “Health informatics and the work force”.