Richard Williams

Richard Williams is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Health Informatics, University of Manchester. He is currently funded by the Manchester BRC and GM ARC, and leads a team of software engineers developing healthcare applications that improve patient safety and clinical decision-making.

His research focuses on electronic health records in primary care, specifically investigating tools and techniques for robust and reproducible research on healthcare data not originally collected for research purposes. A key interest is how researchers create clinical code sets for interrogating EHRs, which led to the development of the GetSet web application to help researchers create, validate, enhance and share their code sets. Williams also studies how EHR information can be effectively fed back to clinicians to drive positive patient outcomes.

Williams has developed several impactful applications including GMCR (Greater Manchester Care Record), SMASH (for identifying patients at risk of hazardous prescribing), FLAG-ME (for identifying vision impairments), PINGR (for finding care improvement opportunities), eADAPT (for lymphoma survivor care), STELAR (asthma and allergies research), and COCPIT (care pathway analysis).

• John Perry Prize (2017) - Recognizing contributions to primary health care
• MIE Science Slam (2018) - Award for science communication in medical informatics

Williams completed his PhD at the University of Manchester with a thesis titled 'Applying software engineering principles to electronic health records in order to improve research and generate patient-specific actionable information.' He also holds a PGDip in Business and Management Studies from the University of Durham and a BA (Hons) in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge.