NHS Information Policy Unit

Postal Address	Department of Health Quarry House LS2 7UE Leeds Yorks United Kingdom
Telephon	Phone: +44 113 254 6247
Fax	Fax:+44 113 254 6261
E-mail	seanbrennan2@compuserve.com

Sean Brennan - Initially a Chief Medical Laboratory Scientific Officer in Immunology, then medical audit co-ordinator and Trust Information Manager, Sean's career reflected his personal objective "to link the application of IT to the "improving clinical care" agenda". Sean was appointed clinical audit advisor to the Department of Health in 1995. As Electronic Patient Record Project Manager for the NHS in England from 1996 - 1998, he was responsible for supporting a number of innovative and ground-breaking SGML projects at Oswestry Hospital, which had been proposed, with great foresight, by an orthopaedic surgeon, Mr Andrew Roberts. Since 1998 his time and duties have been split between the Health Department of the Scottish Executive, the NHS Information Policy Unit in England and independent consultancy projects. One such project was an invitation to Shanghai, along with two colleagues, to contribute to the development of the Shanghai Municipal Health Board's IM&T strategy. He believes that EPR (reinforced by the NHS's Information strategy "Information for Health") should be focused on supporting the clinical care processes with IT and not simply about creating a record on computer. And any record so formed, if XML based, will offer far more to clinicians and managers than traditional database paradigms.

In 1995, Sean Brennan, Bill Dodd and Peter Drury introduced the NHS to the concept of using markup language (SGML) for clinical information. Sean Brennan is an independent healthcare consultant His considerable experience of practical clinical computing includes three years as NHS EPR Programme Manager. He is presently working with the NHS Policy Unit and the Scottish NHS Executive advising on a wide range of clinical computing issues.