Professor Mark Musen from Stanford University will deliver the fourth talk of the King's International Lecture Series, speaking on 'Becoming a Meta-Physician: Better Clinical Information in the Future of Health Care'. 

The lecture will start at 5pm on Tuesday 21 February in Lecture Theatre 1, New Hunt's House, Guy's Campus, London SE1 1UL. This lecture is free and open to the public. Advance booking is not required and refreshments will be available following the event.

Governments on both sides of the Atlantic are making major investments in health information technology in an effort to improve both the quality and the efficiency of medical practice.  Electronic health records are eliminating paper charts and are bringing the power of computers directly to the point of care, as well as enabling the generation of data for research.  

As medical information increasingly becomes encoded in bits and bytes, health-care workers need to understand how best to represent clinical information within electronic records. Professor Musen will discuss the use of ‘ontologies’ – or formal ways of encoding information about patients and their care – within electronic patient records. He will explain how standardising medical language in this way has the potential to improve clinical data, enable research and ultimately improve the quality of clinical advice that is given to patients.