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Biography
I have a portfolio career in which 90% of my hours are spent as a clinical informatician operation at the level of senior strategic leadership, and 10% I am still an ordinary GP, seeing patients, as a peripatetic locum (freelance) doctor.
My informatics career progression evolved from leading on computer software and hardware for my own surgery, to leading for the region (as the digital clinical lead in successive regional health authorities), then for the nation (as a digital clinical lead in NHS Digital which later merged with NHS England) and now for the profession of general practice (at the Royal College of General Practitioners). During that time the roles have been of technical maintenance of hardware and software, information governance, clinical safety assurance, design-build-test of system artifacts for information models for business support and data analytics, and in strategy decisions including commissioning and commissioning frameworks.
I completed an 18 month fixed-term contract working for NHS Digital with the specific aims of producing a strategic view for the primary care technology directorate on the implementation of SNOMED CT and the management of the national reference sets, and completed the contract during the long recruitment / contract renewal freeze after the merger with NHS England, when I instead moved to work at the RCGP.
In my current role as the Deputy Chair of the Health Informatics Group at Royal College of General Practitioners, I represent 78 primary care clinical informaticians at the national centre for excellence in primary care. They have an incredible wealth of subject matter expertise which is operationalised by the executive of our group (the Chair and myself) who sit on the four nations Joint GP IT Committee where we meet with the British Medical Association (BMA), NHS England and the Department of Health & Social Care, to fulfil a contractual role in representing the profession in all new systems, programmes, standards and services which are delivered through GP information technology. This necessarily gives me great exposure to understanding the history of how the four nations came to be where they are, and exert professional influence on behalf of the HIG and the College.
In my other role as a clinical advisor to PRIMIS, the operation primary care data specialist unit at the University of Nottingham, I provide subject matter expertise on the strategic approach to research projects, designing building and testing system artifacts to push EMIS Web to its maximum potential using the developers tools they provide. We fulfil various national contracts such as maintaining the national reference sets which are implemented by suppliers such as Optum and TPP.
Expertise Summary
In summary, I am a national leader in primary care informatics, with considerable experience in the primary care IT software landscape, with broad experience from the coal-face of being a practicing GP, through to strategy, governance and assurance at a national level.
Research Summary
Our team is currently engaged in supporting ongoing research with the University of Sheffield, to test a hypothesis - that a computerised decision support alert deployed in General Practice will… read more