CCIO structure for UCLH

University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is recruiting a chief clinical information officer and will appoint three clinical leads for IT.

Chief information officer James Thomas told EHI the decision to advertise for a CCIO was part of a fundamental review of the future of electronic health records at the trust that began last year.

The trust runs a legacy patient administration system called CareCast, supplied by GE, the contract for which comes to an end in 2015.

The CareCast system is also used in A&E and around that, the trust has developed a Clinical Data Repository in conjunction with CGI.

Thomas said GE would continue to support the system if the trust wanted it, “but we are fairly clear that we want to move away from it by 2015”.

He explained that the trust decided to advertise externally for a CCIO because UCLH was an international brand and it did not want to exclude people from applying.

It could accommodate an external person in most specialties.

UCLH will appoint three clinical IT leads to report to the CCIO.

“We intend to supplement the CCIO role with strong clinical lead positions internally to ensure we cover off allied health professionals and nursing,” Thomas added.

He said the trust already had great clinical engagement, but had never had a named CCIO.

The ICT strategy board includes three medical directors from the three clinical hospital boards and the chief executive.

“We wanted to establish, more formally, a lead clinician role with up to 50% of their time to look at the future of electronic health records over the next three years,” he said.