A pioneer of IT in medical practice, Dr Geoff Clayton is now using
the Web to fight disease
It is a common misconception that people who work in IT are the
only ones who understand computing, writes Roisin Woolnough.
Another myth is that this knowledge is confined to the younger
generations who have grown up using computers from an early age.
But Dr Geoff Clayton, a 70-year-old retired doctor disproves both
theories.
Clayton first became interested in computers in the 1960s and
wrote a program to organise all his patients' details, written in
Cobol on the operating system George. It ran on an ICL 1900, using
punched cards for input. Bletchley Park is to include the punch
card machine in its museum.
"I was one of the pioneers using IT in medical practice," says
Clayton. Indeed, members of the Primary Health Care Specialist
Group of the British Computer Society (BCS) were so impressed with
Clayton's efforts that in 1981 they elected him as their first
chairman.
In 1989 Clayton wrote a program called Takeheart. This assesses
the likelihood of a person developing coronary heart disease.
"Takeheart is written in a language called Sensible, a
compilable language similar to Cobol," says Clayton. "It's old
fashioned - out of date, in fact - and it works in Dos. But my
motto is 'if it works, don't fix it'. I thought about trying
Access, but it's so fragile that I left it how it is."
Takeheart won Clayton the BCS's John Perry Prize for outstanding
contribution to primary healthcare computing in 1990.
Clayton's latest IT venture started a year ago when he decided
to put Takeheart on the Web. "When you retire, you need something
to keep you going," he explains. "I wanted to do something that
would use both my medical experience and my interest in computers.
One of my sons suggested I put Takeheart on the Web, so I did."
The site, www.takeheart.co.uk, is written in HTML, with a bit of
Javascript, and uses the Internet service provider Frontier.
Clayton is the only technical bod on the site, which he says took
him a week to get up and running. "But I am always tinkering with
it and incorporating new ideas," he says.
Clayton has a couple of friends working in IT who advise him
when he is thinking of improving the site and he is an avid reader
of the IT manuals he finds in his local library.
"I intend to get the question and answer bit of the site
automated. I will have to learn a bit of Perl for that," says
Clayton.