Mr Kerr was visiting a facility that offers powerful new tools for analysing the health of the nation and developing new areas of research and treatment.

The Health Infomatics Centre (HIC) is a joint initiative between the University of Dundee, NHS Tayside and NHS Scotland Information Services Division, housed in a purpose-built unit at Ninewells.

The focus of the work at HIC is using information to improve health, bringing together anonymised data from a range of health projects and sources to create a major resource for the health service.

“Tayside and Dundee are really genuinely at the leading edge of health information,” he said.

“It’s great to see and meet the people who are going to make a real difference to us — the people of Scotland in the future —- because what they do now in terms of gathering and assessing data really makes a difference to how we provide health services.”

Mr Kerr joined around 130 delegates — drawn from health professionals, policymakers and members of the public — for today's event, all of them being granted a detailed insight into the work carried out at the centre.

HIC lets researchers analyse the data from hundreds of thousands of individual patients, allowing them to track trends and patterns that had previously gone undetected.

These can offer key insights into how we can improve patient care.

“People give blood generously in Scotland because they know by doing that they either protect them, their families or a stranger who needs blood,” added Mr Kerr.

“Information is actually just the same — the more information we give the health services about our illnesses, our conditions, who we are and what we’re like healthwise, we can then use that information to provide better services to people. So what the Health Infomatics Centre is about is getting that information and using that information to the benefit of patients and changing our health services to meet the needs of patients.

“It’s a fantastic innovation going on here.”

Professor Peter Davey, director of HIC, said, “HIC is founded on over 25 years of successful collaboration between the NHS and the university.

“That early vision is now becoming a reality. The partnership is delivering quality improvement in health services and faster translation of research results into health improvements. This successful model is now being extended throughout Scotland through partnership with NHS Information Systems Scotland.”

All of the data held at HIC is available to researchers only in a purely anonymous form, meaning that a person's health data can be accessed, but with nothing to link it to that individual.

The value for researchers lies purely in the data, not in the identity of the person.