International Fellows

Professor Jane Grimson FREng

Professor of Health Informatics, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland and Director of Health Information, Health Information and Quality Authority, Ireland

Jane Grimson currently holds a personal chair in Health Informatics in Trinity College, Dublin and is also currently Director of Health Information in the Health Information and Quality Authority. Prior to this she was Dean of Engineering and Systems Science, Pro-Dean of Research and Vice Provost at Trinity. She co-founded the interdisciplinary Centre for Health Informatics in Trinity in 1991. The Centre brings together software engineers, clinicians and health professionals generally, statisticians and psychologists to develop innovative approaches to the use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in health.

What or who were you major inspirations during your career?

Lillian Gilbreth, Grace Hopper and Katherine Parsons

What inspired you to study engineering?

My father was an engineer and used to build hydraulic models of harbours and rivers. I was fascinated by how they worked and how they could be used, for example, to determine silt build-up in the real environment. I was always interested in science and loved the hands-on laboratory session in school – especially Physics. But equally I had a curiosity about how things worked and how science and mathematics can be applied to the benefit of people.

I chose to study Computer Engineering when I went to university in 1966 as it was a new programme and the potential of the technology seemed so exciting. Initially my interest was more in how it could be used in civil engineering – particularly in structures and design – but later I became more interested in the information side and specifically applications in health.

What impact has your work had on wider society?

I like to think I have had a positive impact on my students over the years, particularly women students. Being a woman engineer is very rewarding but it can also be isolating. I have been a strong champion of encouraging the recruitment and retention of women in engineering and science and of trying to encourage a working environment which is supportive of everyone, which values the diverse contribution of each individual and which ensures that everyone can develop to their full potential.

From a research perspective, probably the projects which have had the biggest impact are Ait Eile and Solas. These projects target children in hospital and seek to use ICT in innovative and exciting ways to help reduce the sense of isolation which these children feel when taken away from friends and family, sometimes for long periods of time. These systems are widely used in the childrens’ wards in a number of hospitals in Ireland.

More recently I was responsible for the development of a Biobank Information Management System for prostate cancer. By bringing together all the relevant information about patients with prostate cancer, the system promotes knowledge discovery and offers the potential to discover novel biomarkers for the disease thereby improving the treatment and outcomes for individuals.

Although the Health Information and Quality Authority was only established in 2007, I have the opportunity to play a leadership role nationally in the development of appropriate application and use of ICT and health information generally to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our health care systems and above all improve the quality and safety of our healthcare.

What are the main challenges still to be tackled in your field

The Electronic Health Record – a cradle-to-grave longitudinal record of an individual’s healthcare – has long been regarded as the holy grail of health informatics. While there is a growing body of evidence at the local level of the advantages and cost-effectiveness of electronic patient records within individual healthcare organisations and even at regional level, the evidence of the benefits of full integration at national level has proved elusive.

Associated with this is the need to develop better understanding of the impact of ICT generally on our healthcare system. The technology is there to deliver apparently good solutions but actually deploying these systems and using them routinely remains a poorly understood challenge.

What are the main global engineering issues and what is the future of engineering?

Engineering is arguably the most creative profession and research from across the world has shown that teams are at their most creative and innovative when they are composed of people from diverse backgrounds, skills and experience. Like the gene pool we need diversity to ensure that a community is vigorous and thrives and is sustainable. Crucially, men and women bring different perspectives to engineering design and problem-solving so I see one of the major global engineering challenges being to increase diversity particularly by recruiting more women to and retaining them in the profession.

A second major challenge facing engineering arises from its position between society on the one hand and science and mathematics on the other. Traditionally the focus in engineering undergraduate degree programmes has been on engineering science giving students a solid foundation in the basic principles and theories which underpin engineering. However, modern engineering practice requires the engineer to be able to “look both ways”: towards society on the one hand and towards science on the other. I see as one of the major challenges facing the engineering today as the need to extend the focus from the scientific and technical to the human, societal, psychological, environmental and business side of engineering. This has profound implications both for engineering education and for engineering research.