Welcome to the home page of the WestFocus Healthcare Informatics Alliance.

The Alliance - involving healthcare informatics teams at Brunel University and The University of Westminster - aims to promote awareness and transfer of techniques for healthcare modelling to the user community, which includes health and social care professionals in Local Authorities, PCTs, and hospital trusts including clinicians and nurses; SMEs involved in healthcare management consultancy and/or software development.

In addition, the Alliance fosters collaboration between universities and the user community by identifying unfulfilled user needs.

The Healthcare Informatics Alliance staged two extremely successful events at the Royal Institute of Public Health in 2006, attracting over 80 professionals from a variety of organisations (such as PCTs, NHS trusts, local authorities, SHAs, academic institutions and private healthcare consultancy/IT firms). The events showcased state-of-the-art practical applications of mathematical modelling and other software techniques in Care Delivery Management and Healthcare Organisational Management. (Presentations from the events can be downloaded by following the link).

Lively and informative discussions with the delegates laid the groundwork for many potential collaborations between healthcare and industry professionals and the academic participants.

This feedback and these networking links have been fed into several active healthcare knowledge transfer projects involving Brunel and Westminster Universities, notably MASHnet (Modelling and Simulation in Healthcare) and RIGHT (Research Into Global Healthcare Tools).