Profile
Andrew Colman
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About Me:
I live in Hebburn, a small town near Newcastle-upon-Tyne. I’m a medical doctor and software and information systems engineer specializing in patient safety. I’m also an inventor of medical apps and devices.
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I am 61 years old and a retired NHS hospital doctor but I currently work part-time as self-employed, independent research engineer in patient safety specializing in finding and correcting errors in clinical flow charts published in UK national clinical guidelines and medical journal papers.
During the Ebola Fever epidemic in 2014, I found multiple serious errors in Public Health England’s clinical flow chart for its diagnosis and management. I immediately redesigned it and it submitted it to HM Government and my “corrections” were implemented and published within a few days of submission.
In November 2020 I delivered a 2-hour online lecture on the construction of basic clinical flow charts using MS Teams to employees of NHS Health Improvement Scotland which publishes the SIGN ( Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network ) Clinical Guidelines.
In 1991, I invented one of the first pocket-computer systems for use by patients with asthma. If you don’t know anything about asthma, it’s a long-standing and potentially life-threatening condition caused by a temporary and reversible constriction of the small airways of the lungs and is called bronchoconstriction (BS). This causes the symptoms of shortness of breath (SOB) and wheezing and is treated with drugs called bronchodilators that reverse the airway constriction and relieve the SOB. The severity of the BS is measured by blowing into an instrument called a peak flow meter and recorded as a 3-digit, integer value e.g. 400.
With my asthma pocket computer system, a patient was given a Psion Organiser II pocket computer to take home for a week. Every time they made a peak flow measurement ( which is often several times per day but can be at any time during the day or night ), the reading was entered and stored in the computer. At the end of the week, the patient brought the computer back to the hospital and I connected with a data transfer cable to the PC’s RS 232 data input port. This was before the days of wi-fi connections. The pocket computer software was written in a BASIC-like language called OPL (Organiser Programming Language ). Once the data was transferred to the PC, it was processed using a data processing language called Psion PC Four -Archive and a graph of the patient’s peak flow values over the week was printed on a dot-matrix printer. By observing the peak flow patterns on the graph, the doctor can tell if the patient’s asthma is well-controlled or not and if it’s poorly controlled the patient’s medication can be changed.
In 2018, when I was working as an Honorary Research Associate in the Medical School of Newcastle University, I developed a web app ( written as a single webpage using the JavaScript extension called JQuery Mobile ) linked to a QR-coded bracelet for patients with Addison’s Disease to obtain emergency assistance from the general public when they become unwell. I appeared on ITV’s nightly News Programme, “Look North”.
I like walking in the countryside, listening to classical music, cooking and like visiting eastern European countries, particularly Russia!
I have visited many countries in Eastern Europe, Poland ( Krakow, Warsaw, Poznan ), Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, Hungary, Czechia, Lithuania, Serbia, Croatia and Montenegro
My favourite country is Russia where I have visited Moscow, St Petersburg, Perm, Kazan, Ekaterinburg and Izhevsk. Ekaterinburg is in Asia, across the Europe-Asia boundary of the low Ural Mountains.
I love attending classical music concerts at the Music Conservatory in Moscow. Composer, Peter Chaikovski was the principal here in the late 1800s.
I have a working knowledge of French, German and Russian and last year I obtained teaching certificate in Teaching English as a Foreign Language ( TEFL ) so that I can teach this subject in foreign countries.
I have an intermediate Amateur Radio Licence and several radio communication transceivers that allow me to exchange voice and Morse code radio messages with other radio amateurs all over the world.
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My pronouns are:
he/him
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My Work:
Medical doctor, software engineer, and inventor interested in developing novel software and medical devices for improving the health and wellbeing of patients.
I have two research degrees in a subject in which I don’t have a first degree! -
My Typical Day:
My typical day involves getting up at 8 am and listening to the “Today” programme on BBC Radio 4.
For breakfast I eat porridge made with milk and water and sweetened with honey.
After that I have some toast with marmalade and two cups of tea made in a ceramic teapot.
At about 9 am I sit down at my PC and check my emails and continue my research work.
For the last 15 years, I have used a freeware programme, called Diagram Designer, for creating my medical flow charts.
At a around 1 pm I have a sandwich lunch and listen to the “World at One” on BBC Radio 4
Often go out for a 1-hour walk after lunch.
I continue my work and finish it around 6 pm ready to watch the ITV news and “Look North” regional news programme.
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What I'd do with the prize money:
I am a philanthropist and I have purchased and donated an entire library of about 160 university-level books to the Sixth Form of my local school where I have been a governor for the last 8 years.
I would use the prize money to buy more books and some anatomical models to help me teach the students applying for careers in healthcare such as Medicine, Dentistry, and Veterinary Medicine.
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My attributes
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Education:
I went to Hull Grammar School where I received an excellent education. Although it was a Comprehensive, it was still run on the lines of a typical Grammar School with strict discipline and very high academic standards. I excelled academically at school and was awarded many prizes for my school work.
In my 4th year of medical school, I was awarded an academic prize for haematology ( blood diseases ) for an illustrated essay on ‘The Immunology and Clinical Pathology of Paraproteinaemias’.
Soon after qualifying as a doctor, I taught myself computer coding, starting on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum computer consisting of a keyboard connected to the aerial socket of a TV which was used as a monitor. Programming was done in the BASIC ( Beginners All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code ). My late father, an electrical engineer, borrowed it from his work place for me to experiment with. Had he not done this I would never have developed my expertise in this medical field.
Soon I bought my own more powerful Sinclair QL ( “Quantum Leap” ) computer that used a more powerful version of the BASIC language called SuperBASIC and still using a TV as a monitor. The first printer I bought for one of Lord Sugar’s Amstrad dot-matrix printers Amstrad = Alan Michael Sugar Trading.The printer ribbon was exposed so it dried out very quickly and it had to be re-vitalised regularly by spraying it with WD-40 lubricant and keeping it in a sealed jar for a week.
In the early 1990s I moved onto the IBM-compatible PC machines with 286 and 386 processors before the more powerful Intel Pentium processor came along in 1995.
I started coding on PCs using the C and Pascal programming languages which featured computer graphics.
After working in the NHS for a few years I obtained a Science and Engineering Council Research ( SERC ) Scholarship and moved to the University of Manchester’s Institute of Science and Technology ( UMIST ) to do full-time, post-graduate research in computer science applied to medicine, gaining a Research MSc and PhD in the area of computer-assisted instruction for patient and healthcare professional education.
The coding for the MSc was done in Turbo Pascal running on the MS-DOS operating system and calling external libraries providing the functionality of displaying image files and graphic user interface objects.
The coding for the PhD was done in Visual Basic Professional Edition running on the Windows 3.1 operating system.
At UMIST, I studied with Bernard Richards, Professor of Medical Informatics who was Professor Alan Turing’s post-graduate MSc mathematics research student when he was Professor of Mathematics at Manchester University. Bernard did his MSc research on writing the first computer programs to do complex mathematical calculations ( LaGrangian Polynomials, in this case ) that ran on the world’s first digital computer called “The Baby”.
“The Baby” is still demonstrated regularly to the public in Manchester’s Museum of Science and Industry.
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Qualifications:
1978 10 GCES – including English language, literature and spoken English, Maths, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Geography, French, German
1980 3 A- levels Biology, Physics, and Chemistry
1986 Medical Qualification LRCP ( London ) MRCS ( England )
1994 MSc by Research ( Victoria University of Manchester )
1996 PhD ( UMIST ) – University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology
2022 Cert TEFL ( Teaching English as a Foreign Language )
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Work History:
Most of my working life I have done jobs in various NHS hospitals as a middle-grade doctor in general medicine and elderly care and in private hospitals as a Resident Medical Officer ( RMO ). I have used my spare time during these posts to pursue my own research projects in the novel use of computers and software in medical care.
I’m currently the only research scientist working in this field. Doctors aren’t interested in this subject because it’s too technical and the computer scientists don’t have the medical knowledge to understand it properly.
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Current Job:
I am currently developing a smartphone app for displaying interactive medical flowcharts. It uses MIT’s App Inventor language which is very similar to ‘Scratch’ that’s used in schools for teaching coding. Its event-driven, object-oriented language is very powerful and one is able to the “same thing” computationally in many different ways.
My app will contain a “flow chart” engine that can process flow charts of any complexity in any language that can be represented by an alpha numeric character set, including Greek and Russian. I mathematically encode the flow chart in a text file that is read and processed by the “flow chart” engine.
I’m also in the process of critiquing some current, on-line, poorly-designed medical flow charts and reporting the errors they contain to the institutions who have published them.
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Employer:
I am self-employed but I worked for the NHS for many years before I retired from full-time work at the end of March, 2017.
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My Interview
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How would you describe yourself in 3 words?
improves patients' lives and increases patient safety using novel technology
What did you want to be after you left school?
Be a medical doctor
Were you ever in trouble at school?
Once, in an A-Level Chemistry lesson when I was told off for speaking to a classmate whilst the teacher was talking.
If you weren't doing this job, what would you choose instead?
Engineering, particularly civil - I observed the construction and completion of the Humber Bridge over 12 years!
Who is your favourite singer or band?
ABBA and classical music by over 200 different composers
What's your favourite food?
My home-made quiche lorraine - made with bacon, cheddar cheese and eggs and short-crust pastry
If you had 3 wishes for yourself what would they be? - be honest!
1 ) To get healthcare professionals to design flow charts that make sense and do not contain errors that may put patients at risk of harm 2) To get some senior doctors to be more humble towards their patients and colleagues 3) To get an end to the Russian-Ukraine war as soon as possible so that the lovely Ukrainian people no longer suffer and I can restart attending the wonderful classical music concerts at the Moscow Conservatory!
Tell us a joke.
How many computer programmers are needed to replace a light bulb? None, it’s a hardware issue!
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