Dr Marcus Baw
MBChB (Hons), MRCGP | Fellowship of the Faculty of Clinical Informatics awarded 2018 (FFCI)
Clinical informatician, clinical safety officer and software developer
York, United Kingdom | marcus@marcusbaw.com | bawmedical.co.uk | GitHub: pacharanero
British and Irish citizen. Updated September 2026.
Profile
I combine clinical safety, clinical data modelling and hands-on software development. My work spans openEHR International, NHS England and the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH), translating clinical knowledge into interoperable data, usable software and practical safety assurance.
I am a member of the openEHR Software Program Board, Clinical Safety Officer across RCPCH codebases, and a developer of the RCPCH Digital Growth Charts platform. Recent work includes SMART-on-FHIR applications, computable vaccination schedules and local SNOMED CT tooling. I helped pioneer the RCPCH Incubator model of clinically led, reusable open-source software, described in our 2025 paper in Archives of Disease in Childhood.
My NHS clinical background spans general practice, emergency medicine, anaesthesia, intensive care, prison healthcare and palliative care. I now work in health technology rather than clinical practice, bringing that clinical experience directly into requirements, modelling, implementation and safety decisions. I work comfortably with developers and clinical teams, and with customers through demonstrations, workshops, tenders and implementation support.
Current and recent work
RCPCH - software development, clinical safety and the Incubator
- Initiated the Digital Growth Charts platform in 2020 and continue to develop it: an open-source API providing structured child growth calculation results for integration into clinical systems.
- Clinical Safety Officer across RCPCH codebases, combining software development with clinical safety work. NHS Digital-trained CSO, named in the Digital Growth Charts Clinical Risk Management Plan.
- Developed SAFETY.md, a repository-native approach to managing clinical safety cases, hazard logs and supporting evidence, and applied it to RCPCH codebases. Contributed this work to ArcKit. The approach supports DCB0129/DCB0160 documentation and evidence management; it does not replace the standards or professional safety judgement.
- Work on Digital PEWS and the Digital Growth Charts SMART-on-FHIR application, bringing paediatric charting and calculations into FHIR-connected application workflows. This is development work; Digital PEWS has not yet designated a clinically approved release.
- Helped pioneer the RCPCH Incubator model: clinical guidance and expertise delivered as reusable, openly developed software rather than repeatedly implemented in separate systems. Co-authored the 2025 paper describing this approach.
- Key member of the RCPCH customer pitch team, delivering demonstrations and workshops, contributing to tender and bid responses, and providing training and implementation support. Explain clinical models and safety decisions to mixed clinical and technical audiences.
openEHR International - infrastructure and Software Program Board
2022 - present
- Provide systems administration and infrastructure support, including forum/server maintenance, updates, websites and GitHub administration.
- Member of the Software Program Board, contributing to the openEHR software community and its work on developer usability and shared tooling.
- Bring earlier training and experience in openEHR clinical data modelling, experience with EtherCIS, EHRbase and the Ripple stack, and a contribution to the Ruby implementation of the openEHR specification.
- Advocate practical, reusable implementations of open standards, with documentation and tools that make clinical data easier for developers to work with.
NHS England - clinical consultant, MAVIS vaccinations platform
- Provide clinical consultancy for the MAVIS vaccinations platform.
- Developed greenbook out of this work: a prototype that evaluates FHIR vaccination histories against computable, versioned UK immunisation schedules, including historical schedules.
- Model the relationship between vaccination records, product terminology, age and dose intervals, and the schedule applicable over time. The prototype separates schedule rules from its evaluation engine, with Rust and JavaScript implementations checked against shared conformance tests.
- Use this work to explore how published clinical guidance can become explicit, testable data and software.
greenbookis a proof of concept, not an authoritative replacement for national immunisation guidance or an approved clinical decision-support service.
Clinical terminology and reusable infrastructure
- Author of sct, a suite of fast, local SNOMED CT tools for working with terminology releases, querying and transforming data, and producing reusable outputs. Its scope includes UK medicines terminology and legacy CTV3/Read V2 data.
- Maintainer of the nhs-number Python package, used in the UK and internationally for NHS number validation, normalisation and generation.
- Earlier clinical assurance of CTV3-to-SNOMED CT cross-mapping tables, supporting safe migration from older coding systems.
Earlier informatics and product experience
- Medicus Health, clinician consultant and developer, 2020-2021: Clinical consultancy for a new UK and Irish GP IT supplier; development of open-source clinical calculation libraries for its application.
- RCGP Health Informatics Group, Chair, 2019-2022: National clinical informatics leadership. Also formerly Co-chair of the BMA/RCGP Joint GP IT Committee.
- NHS Digital, Clinical Adviser, GP Connect, October 2018 - March 2019: Worked with technical architects, GP system suppliers and the clinical safety team on safe, interoperable GP APIs, including clinical workflow, information governance and assurance considerations.
- Open Health Care UK, 2018: Software development on elCID and the OPAL platform using Python, Django and Angular.
- PRSB Child Health Events, 2017: Clinical adviser to the Professional Record Standards Body project. Also developed software for Endeavour Health’s Discovery platform using Angular and Java.
- NHS.UK Alpha and Beta, September 2015 - April 2016: Team clinician working alongside user researchers, content editors, developers and the strategy team.
- Clinical standards and usability: Lead-author contribution to the RCGP Patient Online Access roadmap; development of an open, community-owned clinical software usability question framework.
Clinical background and registration
Qualified in medicine in 2000. Previous clinical work includes GP training in Wigan (2008-2011), subsequent locum general practice in the North West and Yorkshire, prison general practice at HMP Manchester from 2011, emergency medicine at Whiston, Salford Royal (2012-2017) and York, anaesthesia and intensive care training in the Mersey Deanery, and hospice general practice at Wigan and Leigh Hospice.
This background includes practical prescribing experience with SystmOne and EMIS, alongside acute assessment, long-term conditions, complex comorbidity, medicines use and continuity of care across hospital and community settings.
GMC registration: 4712729, without a licence to practise. I have relinquished my licence and no longer undertake clinical practice. Irish Medical Council registration: 429540. My current work is in clinical informatics, software development and clinical safety, not direct patient care.
Technical and collaborative skills
- Clinical data: openEHR, FHIR, SMART on FHIR, SNOMED CT, UK medicines terminology, CTV3/Read V2 and ICD-10; clinical concepts, mappings, versioned rules and API integration.
- Engineering: Ruby, Python, Rust and JavaScript; previous Angular, Django and Java work. Git/GitHub, Linux, Docker, API design, deployment automation and technical documentation.
- Delivery: Clinical requirements and workflow interpretation, user-centred design, agile delivery, behaviour-driven specifications using Gherkin/Cucumber, testable clinical rules and remote collaboration.
- Communication: Customer demonstrations, workshops, tenders, training and implementation support; translating between clinical and technical audiences.
- Community: Founder of Open Health Hub, co-founder of Leigh Hackspace and organiser of NHS Hack Days; development and administration of Discourse communities including the Digital Health Networks.
Qualifications and selected publication
- MBChB (Hons), University of Liverpool, 2000: Distinction in Medicine and Surgery.
- MRCGP, 2011: Membership by examination; current member.
- FFCI, 2018: Fellowship awarded by peer-reviewed admission. The Faculty of Clinical Informatics has since ceased to exist.
- Clinical Safety Officer training: NHS Digital.
- Clinical modelling training: Standards-neutral modelling and openEHR.
Baw MJ, Dimitri P, Chapman S, et al. RCPCH incubator: a new model for building open, sustainable digital health. Archives of Disease in Childhood, published online 28 October 2025.
References available on request.