So you’ve decided to make the move into a formalised (or maybe non-formalised) chief clinical information officer or clinical lead in informatics role – or you are interested in so doing. What are the skills that you are going to need to make a success of your new position?
The five skills you need
- An interest in improving care and patient safety
The fundamental purpose of a CCIO role is the same as that of any other clinical position – to find ways to deliver the best possible care. The method just happens to be informatics and IT.
So perhaps the most important skill a CCIO needs to possess is an interest in finding innovative ways to improve patient care and safety.
You need to be ready to use your clinical expertise to think about better ways to make informatics or IT projects more efficient and more likely to improve outcomes for patients.
Continuing to have a strong interest in clinical work will make this easier, as well as ensure you have credibility with the clinicians whose views you will be representing.
- Leadership abilities
You will need the ability to build coalitions and win hearts and minds. Think about your leadership style. Being a heroic leader will get you noticed, and win you friends initially, but you will quickly get burnt out.
You probably want to consider adopting a transformational style, but this is not easy. Being ‘distant’ both geographically (the IT department is rarely in the main building of an NHS organisation) and in terms of practice (you are likely to be a senior clinician) means that you will need to find inventive ways of demonstrating your vision.
Encouraging others to be involved in shaping your personal and departmental strategy is useful, and tends to make people more likely to follow the strategy once it is set.
- Change management
New informatics and IT projects mean change. That in turn means that change management is a key part of the CCIO role, and a key skill to hone. You need to be recognised as someone who embraces change – lead by example in that sense.
- Persuasion and empathy
To be a CCIO is to go from convincing medical students that they must not share passwords to persuading the trust board that this financing request is an important one to support. Communication and influencing skills are key.
So too is the ability to see a problem from many different perspectives. If a change to an IT system aids the medics who are using it but makes things far trickier for nurse or AHP users, is it worth making?
You will need to balance multiple – sometimes competing – interests and viewpoints. But also bear in mind that everyone believes that their practice is special and different to everyone else’s – and generally it’s not!
- The ability to be a translator
As a CCIO, you are the bridge between the IT team and your clinical colleagues. You need to know the language of each group, and find ways to translate it for non-native speakers.
If your IT colleagues have a concern about security, you need to find ways to explain that to clinicians in a way that resonates with them – and helps them understand the issue. You will be an advocate for IT among clinicians, but also an advocate for clinicians among IT.If your IT colleagues have a concern about security, you need to find ways to explain that to clinicians in a way that resonates with them – and helps them understand the issue. You will be an advocate for IT among clinicians, but also an advocate for clinicians among IT.
The personal qualities that will help
- A positive mental attitude. Without wishing to sound too much like our colleagues in the US, it is really important to be able to see the positives in the day to day work you are doing. Being able to relate development or clinical systems implementation back to clinical practice will help you, and your colleagues, to appreciate the importance of the role you’re doing.
- A recognition of your limitations. You won’t have the time to do everything you want to do, and you probably won’t have all the skills either. Work out how you can make the biggest difference with what you do have, and go to others to help with what you don’t.
- An ability to make friends. Don’t be a lone ranger: find people whose expertise complements yours, and work with them. This will no doubt include clinicians at all levels, but also IT colleagues, service improvement colleagues, and people working in business intelligence
- A willingness to think outside the box. In your clinical practice, you may be used to following protocols and procedures. Alternatively, you may be used to making fully autonomous decisions. Being involved in informatics means being open-minded about both options. It’s about finding better ways to do things, and that may mean different ways – just because something has always been done in a specific way doesn’t mean it should remain unchanged.
The one thing you don’t need
A PhD in IT. Being a techie or IT expert is not a pre-requisite for being a successful CCIO. As the list above shows, the ability to form networks and communicate effectively across teams is much more important.