Brian McKinstry (MD FRCPE FRCGP)

Emeritus Professor of Primary Care E-Health

Background

 Brian McKinstry is a general practitioner and Emeritus Professor of Primary Care eHealth at the University of Edinburgh. He leads SHARE the Scottish Health Research Register (www.registerforshare.org) and until recently he led the Telescot programme of research into telehealth (www.telescot.org)

His research interests are mainly around remote information exchange between clinicians and patients, more recently focussed on eHealth and telehealthcare. The Telescot programme has carried out multiple randomised controlled trials and descriptive/qualitative studies in this area. These studies include telemonitoring of chronic obstructive airways disease, heart failure, high blood pressure (HBP) and diabetes, remote measurement of cough and respiratory rate, the use of machine learning on patient accrued data to develop improved telemonitoring algorithms and video-consulting in general practice.  He is clinical lead for Scale-Up BP, a large-scale implementation of telemonitoring  of HBP, and is exploring the use of routinely acquired data to evaluate this. He has with colleagues in the Scottish Government developed and is testing a home telemonitoring system to detect deterioration in people recently diagnosed with COVID-19.

Qualifications

MB ChB, MD, MRCPUK, FRCPE, FRCGP

Responsibilities & affiliations

Honorary Professor of Medicine University of St Andrews.

Research summary

His research interests are mainly around Health Service Research particularly in remote information exchange between clinicians and patients.  His recent research has centred on telehealthcare and he has carried out several randomised controlled trials and qualitative studies in this area.  These studies include telemonitoring of chronic obstructive airways disease, heart failure, high blood pressure and diabetes along with studies of satellite location for wandering people with dementia, the use of gamification to encourage children and adolescents to adopt healthier lifestyles, developing artificially intelligent avatar based systems for monitoring depression, robotic dispensing, remote measurement of cough and respirator rate and the use of machine learning on patient accrued data to develop improved telemonitoring algorithms. He is clinical lead for teh Technology Enabled Care Programme of the Scottish Government. He continues to be involved in Scale-UP BP a large scale telehealth deployment for managing blood pressure and TeleCOVID an intervention to allow patients at risk of deterioration with COVID to self manage at home along with several other techenology based projects in the UK, India Pakistan and Canada.

Project activity

Brian is involved with projects at both UK and European levels.

 Brian McKinstry – Projects — University of Edinburgh Research Explorer