War and peace, but mostly peace

The IT director and the chief clinical information officer of a London trust have explained how their collaborative partnership – and mix of personalities – has helped to create an electronic patient record that has been assessed as one of the best in Europe.

In a presentation entitled ‘War and Peace – a CCIO and an ICT director working together’ at the first CCIO Leaders Network Annual Conference, Colin Sweeney and Jack Barker from King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust said combining their perspectives has contributed to a number of successes.

These include the creation of an EPR analysed as level ‘five’ by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society [equivalent to the top 8% of American hospitals and significantly higher than the vast majority of European healthcare providers].

Sweeney said it was recognised at the very start of the EPR project that it would be important to build relationships between IT and clinicians.

“At the beginning we took a clinical team out and about to see various systems,” he told delegates at the NEC in Birmingham.

“The implementation team involved a lot of clinicians and the original project board was chaired by an A&E consultant.”

It is this sort of clinical involvement, Dr Barker explained, that has made it possible to create solutions which match clinical need and practice. He gave the example of the trust’s recently introduced e-clerking system.

“My role was to look at what the medical world was saying about the standards and what such documents need to look like and we then developed another piece of software.

“We put it into the medical admissions unit six weeks ago and the technology was fine; but the unit team pulled it because they got very busy and decided they were not getting patients through fast enough.

“Then my job was to sit down with another of Colin’s team, who is a nurse by background, and ask ‘how can we make it go faster, how can we help users?’”

Dr Barker argued that the experience at King’s demonstrated the truth of the adage that two heads are better than one.

“When you stand on your own I think it’s quite easy for people to knock you over but when you two of you are saying the same thing, it’s difficult to knock you over,” he said.

“Working together you can achieve a lot more than you do as individuals.Colin and I have different personalities and it’s helpful to have a bit of both. I’ll never be like him and he’ll never be quite like me.”

EHealth Insider launched the EHI CCIO Campaign to lobby for all NHS organisations to appoint a CCIO to lead on IT and information projects.

The CCIO Leaders Network was set up to forward the campaign, support the CCIOs that have been appointed, and promote the careers of clinicians with an interest in becoming CCIOs.