Malcolm H Duncan

Malcolm Pic

Most frequently asked question:	Why did you leave medicine?
Most frequently given answer:	I have not left medicine!

I spent ten years after qualifying in Medicine (University College Hospital Medical School, London, UK) working mostly in General Medicine and Clinical Biochemistry. As my interest in medical informatics grew so did my frustration over the chasm of incomprehension and unrealistic expectation between many suppliers, commissioners and the (often sidelined) end-users of systems.

To succeed, healthcare informatics systems must

satisfy clinical and administrative requirements
place support of front line staff in core clinical and non-clinical activities ahead of 'process redesign' and cost-cutting agendas
pick low hanging fruit before reaching for blue sky
define required outputs at the outset - "put lots of nice data in and we can do anything with it later" never works
recruit the right teams to design, implement and train users on systems. This is not a matter of sheer numbers; thirty people who do not understand a problem are less likely than three well selected people to succeed

Countless small victories are missed. Waiting until the perfect system arrives also achieves nothing.

Useful low cost scaleable applications can be designed and implemented which satisfy real requirements now! Increasingly versatile messaging and coding standards allow small and large systems to communicate for mutual benefit.

I believe I have a valuable contribution to make but not in ten minutes a week between ward rounds. I work full time to achieve progress and founded Medical Object Oriented Software in 1998.

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Thank you for visiting this page.

Kind regards, Malcolm