Clinical Informatics Leadership Award 2020 nominees span clinical specialties

eHealthNews.nz: Clinical Informatics

Clinical Informatics Leadership Award 2020 nominees span clinical specialties

Sunday, 11 October 2020

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The 2020 Clinical Informatics Leadership Award attracted six nominations from across New Zealand, spanning clinical specialties. The award nominees, in alphabetical order are:

Karen Blake, head of clinical informatics, healthAlliance (Midwifery)

Karen heads the diverse and expanding informatics team at healthAlliance, the provider of shared ICT services to Auckland and Northland DHBs.

Karen has shown exceptional leadership in response to the Covid-19 pandemic leading healthAlliance's Incident Management, Recovery and Welfare teams, delivering effective processes to support healthAlliance's ICT response for the region's DHBs, and ensuring alignment with national incident management processes.

As a midwife and trained first responder, Karen makes sure that she is clinically credible to the clinicians served by her informatics team, enabling a shared understanding of what needs to be done to ensure improvements in project success.

To support the next generation of clinical informaticians she runs clinical informatics internships for the University of Auckland and AUT, and gives guest lectures at these universities.

Karen is also a founding member and former co-chair of New Zealand's Clinical Informatics Leadership Network.

Victoria Brevoort, clinical systems manager, Ryman Healthcare (Nursing)

Victoria has been instrumental in providing the clinical context in the development of Ryman's bespoke patient management digital care planning application, myRyman Care. This has included the creation of online assessments; clinical care event workflows; and smart links between various clinical processes and systems to reduce error and increase ease of use for care staff.

She is now embarking on a project that will enable any of the 11,700 independent Ryman residents to develop their own Lifestyle Plan to support them to take charge of their own health and wellbeing.

In response to Covid-19, Victoria helped to deliver and implement a telehealth solution across the country, which included the deployment of Zoom onto 3,800 care centre room devices.

Victoria has the drive and passion to not just think about Ryman, but the greater community and is keen to not only set the standard with a 'can-do' attitude, but share knowledge that can benefit all.

Lara Hopley, clinical adviser digital innovation, Waitematā DHB (medicine)

Lara has led many of the Waitematā DHB Leapfrog clinical IT projects including electronic ordering systems and electronic internal DHB referrals and has taken these from concept to implementation in usual clinical practice.

Lara has undertaken numerous projects in response to Covid-19 including; texting of negative results; informatics related to quarantine; Covid whiteboards; outpatient e-Prescribing; and electronic ordering of tests.

These projects have made a huge difference to the response to Covid-19 and established the ground for future work related to distributed, co-ordinated eHealth, both in the Northern Region and nationally.

An important component of her expertise is that she is a seasoned clinician with a wide understanding of clinical matters, and what will and won't work for those at the clinical coal face. But she also understands the technical side in detail. This allows her to bridge the divides that separate administrators, clinicians and those with expertise at informatics.

Gloria Paterson, clinical leader Waitematā DHB (Allied Health)

Gloria has developed and promoted Telehealth within Allied Health and the wider healthcare communities at Waitematā DHB and has a passion for digital innovation.

She has created several pathways within the outpatient arena for digital health innovations. These include using in person video conferencing for lymphodema patients , reducing patients waiting times and the requirement to travel to attend appointments prior to Covid-19.

This work has led to improved patient choice as well as improved patient waiting times for services.

As a clinical leader Gloria has excelled within the clinical space, using her expertise to lead others in the use of telehealth. She has been instrumental in ensuring telehealth policies and processes are clear and has ensured that the wider group have insight and a voice in the undertaking of a whole DHB policy.

Stacey Simpson, clinical nurse specialist, Canterbury DHB (Nursing)

The arrival of Covid-19 meant Canterbury DHB decided to rollout nursing documentation in its care coordination platform, Cortex, to all medical/surgical areas on the Christchurch campus.

Working with senior nursing staff from each service, Stacey led the development of this nursing documentation, adapting base documents to meet individual service needs while still ensuring the DHB maintained standardised formats and content across nursing documentation.

Keeping staff engaged and able to impact on the outcome ensured they owned the process and CDHB has successfully replaced the majority of its paper inpatient clinical record.

Stacey's organisational skill, expertise and ability to analyse issues and identify solutions that meet clinical needs has benefited all users.

She has brought teams together, enabled those teams to see the value of Cortex as an application and championed the needs of patients and staff in the use of Cortex.

Emma Williams, TrendCare and CCDM programme manager, Capital and Coast DHB (Midwifery)

Emma has successfully implemented the Care Capacity and Demand Management programme at CCDHB in partnership with the nursing and midwifery unions and has shared her knowledge and experiences with other DHBs.

Emma was instrumental in creating a dashboard showing 23 metrics and Emma and the IT team created accessibility to this information via the QLIK app. She has facilitated clinical staff to use the app by providing data literacy education, enabling staff to make data driven decisions.

By using actual examples of nursing and midwifery practice, staff are easily able to relate to Emma and the value of the CCDDM work. Skills developed in her role as a midwife mean she has been able to clearly communicate her vision and deliver education to a hugely diverse staff population.

Three finalists for the 2020 award, selected by a judging panel, will be announced next week when a public vote will open to decide the winter.