Clinicians meet to promote clinical input to health IT

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Picture: Richard Corbidge, chief digital and information officer at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, UK

eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

Guest column by Richard Corbridge, Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust, UK

A group of clinicians met at last week’s HiNZ Conference 2018 to initiate a community of interest to ensure clinical engagement in digital healthcare development in New Zealand.

Being in at the start of the creation of something new is always exciting, as happened when a melting pot of clinical enthusiasm for digital healthcare was brought together last Tuesday afternoon at HiNZ 2018: a melting pot of knowledge, of need and of a real desire to not just try something different but to get something right.

Thirty clinical brains were in the room, all from diverse backgrounds and all ready to work out how to share openly to change the paradigm for how digital healthcare in New Zealand progresses from a process of clinical engagement.

The focus of the gathering started to be defined:

• how can clinicians come together to ensure that digital systems stop abusing clinical practice and are there to support the reform of healthcare
• how can clinicians create a group, an informal group, that can ensure that the tasks that digital delivers against are those that enable the system to “do the right thing as the low energy task”.

Platform for patient-centric clinical leadership

The group will now move forward to create an informal way for clinicians to support each other regardless of geography. It will create a platform for sharing stories and lessons learnt and to reach out to others to seek guidance.

The clinical group will have a raison d'être to ensure that a patient-centric clinical leadership group is created.

The group will be more than an advisory group to sit and pontificate on the latest policy or strategy, but will be there to aid each element to innovate, learn and move forward.

The group did agree not to become a formal group. Instead they would consider the creation of a charter for their existence, but felt they needed to become a community of interest that could work together in a supportive and friendly manner and not become another body of governance.

A community of interest will be created around goodwill rather than a perceived government-based mandate.

Projects to tackle

Some of the key projects the group wants to tackle include the joining up of the portal capability of New Zealand, the promotion of open standards and open API culture, and the assurance of workforce development of clinical leaders with a digital background.

The group defined their goal as becoming a friendly and approachable activist that offers a distributed voice of the clinical communities.

The avoidance of silos is high on the agenda of the team: how to ensure that all voices can be represented was seen to be a problem of communication and engagement rather than governance setting and rules.

“If you feel your voice is not heard then pull up a chair at the table” was the ethos, as this was considered to be the best approach to inclusivity – but it will take good communication.

Richard Corbidge is the chief digital and information officer at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, UK