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 led the Telescot programme of research into telehealth (www.telescot.org). 

His research interests are mainly around Health Service Research, particularly in remote information exchange between clinicians and patients. His recent research has centred 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 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 respiratory rate, the use of machine learning on patient-accrued data to develop improved telemonitoring algorithms and, more recently, the use of video consulting in general practice. 

He currently leads Scale-Up BP, a large-scale implementation project to deliver telehealthcare to thousands of people in Scotland. He is working with colleagues in the Scottish Government to develop a telemonitoring system for people self-managing at home with COVID-19.