Acting alone it can be incredibly difficult to have any influence on the systems in which we have to live and work. Membership of a network of like-minded individuals - who share a set of ambitions and problems - can give you a voice and a seat at the right table.
At the launch of the CCIO Leaders Network in March 2012, I had the chance to ask the then-health secretary Andrew Lansley about the injustice facing North Midlands and East trusts in terms of having no benefit from the from the National Programme for IT.
He promised that NME trusts would be free to choose their systems – sadly I didn’t hear “and the money saved in negotiations with local service provider will be given to NME trusts to purchase their secondary care system of choice.”
You don’t always get everything you want; but the network did at least put me in a position to ask the question.
Growing the Network
Andrew Lansley, NPfIT and the body that ran it, NHS Connecting for Health, have all gone. But the CCIO Leaders Network has survived and thrived.
At recent joint CCIO/CIO event, one chief information officer gave me a ‘light bulb’ moment when he said: “People keep saying we need to be a more intelligent customer. But to be honest, we have done electronic patient records everywhere that we’ve been allowed to. We are pretty savvy customers. What we need are better informed system suppliers.”
The challenge facing us in health IT is how do we best inform the supplier community? And how do we make them join it all up?
Lessons from History
Lord Kelvin at Westinghouse
It has been my privilege to chair the network for the last 18 months and in an attempt to better understand how new technologies and networks develop I started to look for ideas from previous, successful, mass technology adoptions.
From electricity…
The situation is analogous to the electricity industry 100 years ago. My hometown, Newcastle, was the centre of development of this industry.
Local boy Charles Merz (the younger man pictured above with Lord Kelvin when he visited the Westinghouse Company) opened one of the world’s first power stations.
Although largely a forgotten figure now, it was Merz who realised that the industry wouldn’t really flourish until it agreed on a standard voltage and frequency.
Merz got a network of like-minded individuals together. It took him 20 years to get agreement on 240 volts and 50 hertz. The establishment of the National Grid required legislation and the establishment of an electricity board, all of which needed to be informed by his network of experts in the new field.
Tragically, Merz didn’t live to see the post-war boom in domestic electrical appliance adoption because he was killed by German bombing during the blitz in 1940. But he had established that interoperability was good for everyone: suppliers and customers alike. His network of people produced the network that became the National Grid.
To the world wide web…
The other great example of the power of networks in our time is, of course, Tim Berners Lee’s World Wide Web Consortium. Established in 1994, it delivers the standards required to run the internet – without which this handbook would not exist.
In the case of both Merz’s and Berner-Lee’s networks, membership is acquired by dint of specialist knowledge and a willingness to share that knowledge with others for the common good. These two principles underpin the CCIO Leaders Network.
As more and more organisations appoint CCIOs and our membership grows, so our influence within health IT has grown. So it isn’t a surprise that NHS England has chosen to fund the further development of the network through this handbook and our open-source online collaboration platform.
The Future
From its inception, rising from the ashes of the national programme, the CCIO Leaders Network has sought to improve the end user experience of health IT systems and the value for money they provide, thereby improving care for patients.
We will continue to meet with each other and share information about systems, their usability and cost. We will continue to share examples of best practice in webinars and in person and increasingly through our online collaboration platform. We will continue to grow the cadre of clinically-driven, tech savvy, delivery-focused CCIOs required to transform healthcare in the UK.
Over the next few years we will be increasingly looking to drive the market in health IT to the position where our network leaves a real legacy, like the National Grid or the internet.
We will continue to share our successes and failures so that we don’t ever have to make the same mistake twice. In particular we can share information on safety issues across system suppliers through our industry CCIO group.
In a few years’ time it is my firm belief that the members of this network will look back on playing a key role in the development of a National Grid of Health Information which supports patients, clinicians and a world-beating research environment.
About the author: Dr Joe McDonald is a consultant psychiatrist and deputy medical director at Northumberland, Tyne and Wear NHS Foundation Trust. He is chair of the CCIO Network.