The application of computer science to healthcare science is known as clinical and scientific computing. It is a rapidly developing area of healhcare science and is becoming more regulated.
Clinical scientists working in clinical scientific computing can come from a variety of educational backgrounds for example: computer scientists, biologists, physicists and engineers. However, they all share similar postgraduate training to become a clinical scientist and work together at the intersection of technology and healthcare.
Clinical software development
The clinical measurement team regularly develops innovative software solutions to solve clinical problems within the hospital, and uses existing technology to help improve patient care. We develop software in a variety of programming languages, such as:
- C# with .NET Core
- Python
- Javascript / Typescript
Clinical scientists also understand some of the more complex areas of healthcare computer science, for example, medical imaging and physiological measurement software, and how to apply artifical intelligence to healthcare. They often lead the development of clinical software with support from clinical technologists who are software developers or IT engineers.
Clinical safety
Clinical scientists are experts in risk management and provide clinical safety risk management advice to hospitals, if they are qualified as a digital clinical safety practitioner.
This helps to ensure that the software that the hospital is using has undergone risk assessments for patient safety. This is also required to comply to with the law and NHS England standards DCB0160 and DCB0129. Some of the software developed by hospitals can also come under the medical device regulations and clinical scientists assess the compliance of in-house developed software to these regulations.
Clinical scientists in computing are also heavily involved in the commissioning of new medical systems.