Michael Rigby

Professor Rigby holds a personal chair in health information strategy in the Centre for Heath Planning and Management at Keele University. His early career was in the National Health Service, in policy research and planning, during which time he developed a strong interest in information. He was appointed visiting lecturer to the centre in 1986, joined their full-time staff in September 1990 and was promoted to professor in February 2005.

Michael Rigby was an active member and work strand leader of the EU project TEAC-Health (Towards European Accreditation and Certification of Health Telematics Services. He has worked with the project leader, Dr. Jari Forsström of Finland, in promoting the findings on options for verifying quality of health software, Internet sites and telemedicine.

From 2002-2005 he was co-principal researcher in the tri-university project to develop IBHIS (Integrational Broker for Heterogeneous Information Sources), funded by the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council).

Michael has published a wide range of books and book chapters, papers and articles, principally about planning, information, child health and mental health services, issues of health service development, evaluation and international comparison. He is the creator and series editor of "Harnessing Health Information" published by Radcliffe Medical Press and other books including "Taking Health Telematics into the 21st Century" and "Vision and Value in Health Information".

Synopsis

In any setting, health care record systems will always have boundaries. This research project explored broker technology as a potential means to reach across those boundaries in order to be able to gather patient information from autonomous and heterogeneous systems. The presentation will describe the key outputs of the project: a service-oriented broker that incorporates models for distributed access control and semantic interoperability. It will also describe the method developed for converting data sources into Web services.