John Powell

Interview with Andrew Marr on Radio 4 Start The Week: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08tvj71

John Powell is an academic public health physician and health services researcher studying healthcare in the digital age and how and why people use information and communication technologies in relation to health, and how services can harness digital tools to deliver benefit. He combines an academic career as Professor and NIHR Senior Investigator at the University of Oxford with a role as a senior clinician at NICE, where he advises the NHS on the safe adoption of surgical and other interventional procedures, as well as working on the appraisal of digital health technologies. He is an expert adviser to Public Health England (PHE) and to the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). He also works as a television drama advisor where his credits include Downton Abbey, Spanish Flu: The Forgotten Fallen, SSGB and the movie Ammonite.

He was formerly Professor of Public Health at the University of Warwick where he led an Ehealth Research Group for 7 years and helped establish the Institute for Digital Healthcare. He has previously been the Clinical Director for NHS Choices (www.nhs.uk the NHS website), and the Senior Medical Adviser to Netdoctor.co.uk during its launch phase in the UK. He is Editor-in-Chief of the NIHR Health Technology Assessment (HTA) and Efficacy & Mechanism Evaluation (EME) journals and was Deputy Programme Director of the NIHR Evidence Synthesis Programme. He was founding editor of the SAGE journal Digital Health. He has degrees in Social and Political Sciences and in clinical medicine from the University of Cambridge. His PhD was in the use of the internet in relation to mental health. He has been an Honorary Professor at the University of Manchester and Visiting Professor at Kings College London. He has an H-index of 51.