Tim Benson

Tim has been involved in medical computing and outcomes measurement for most of his career. He trained originally as a mechanical engineer, and in 1974 he was appointed leader of the computer evaluation team at the Charing Cross Hospital in London. There he developed a methodology for socio-economic evaluation of computer systems and new ways of measuring patient health status, working with Dr Rachel Rosser.

In 1980 he established the first commercial GP computer supplier (Abies Informatics Ltd), where he brought together a remarkable group of people, including Dr David Markwell and Dr James Read, and produced the first problem-oriented electronic medical record system for GPs, developed the Read Codes (now the NHS standard and the basis of SNOMED CT), and the first smart-card based electronic medical record. 

In 1990 he was appointed convenor of the European Standards Organisation (CEN) working group on healthcare messaging and communications, where he collaborated closely with HL7 in the USA.  This group developed both a new methodology and standards for all of the most important message flows, which has led directly to HL7 Version 3. 

He worked for the Cabinet Office to develop a methodology for developing XML schema as part of the e-Government Interoperability Framework (e-GIF), and for the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) to develop standards for e-Commerce, which was a key input into OASIS UBL (Universal Business Language).

Tim is an honorary Senior Research Fellow at UCL and has been the interoperability architect for the Wellcome Trust’s Sintero Server project at Cardiff University.

He is author of Principles of Health Interoperability HL7 and SNOMED, Springer 2010.