CiLN Award 2020 finalist – Lara Hopley

FEATURE – eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

Lara Hopley, anaesthetist and Clinical Advisor Digital Innovations, Waitematā DHB (medicine)

Judge’s comment

“Lara’s nomination identifies a significant level of expertise and skill across a broad range of informatic areas. Her nomination praises her skills in teaching, a willingness to share knowledge with colleagues, advocation for user design and proactive change management. 

“Her steadfast leadership and the key role she played in the pandemic response, met the fast pace of clinical demand to adapt and broker essential collaborations.  She is highly praised for her engagement and collaboration skills across her networks.”

Nominator quote

“Lara gives selflessly of her time and expertise across the region. Her ability to think through clinician workflow challenges and come up with real ways of making things work is a real asset to Waitematā DHB and the Northern region.” 

“She has a unique ability of sharing a vision and being able to translate it into how that will work in reality, bringing technical and clinical teams together.”

Profile

Lara has contributed leadership to many northern region DHB clinical IT projects including Waitematā electronic outcomes forms, electronic orders of tests from the metro DHB hospital to community laboratories, electronic referrals, and electronic prescribing from specialists to community pharmacies. 

She has been a teacher on Waitematā DHB’s Clinical Digital Academy and has unofficially mentored many others, clinical and non-clinical, to increase their understanding of health information systems or to develop their roles/careers in health IT in the sector.

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. 

She also understands the technical side in detail, allowing her to bridge the divides between administrators, clinicians and those with expertise at informatics.

Responding to Covid-19

During the Covid response Lara helped to rapidly deployed a Covid cohort management pathway within Regional Clinical Portal, which extended into the Covid logic machine, with background rules assessing information from various sources that can automatically raise the Covid status of the patient in the portal banner, whiteboards, eOrder and summary screens

She spearheaded eNotifications from primary care, laying the groundwork for patients to have their negative test results through text messaging within minutes of it being resulted, an idea that she is hoping to see delivered wide.

Nationally, she has is contributing clinically to the design of Border Clinical Management System, which will offer a paperless ordering and swab collection system, the first in New Zealand. This is seen as a game changer by the staff on the ground in terms of infection risk, patient identification and speed of processing for Covid tests. 

Everyone will benefit from these efforts, especially in the longer term as a more joined-up public health system will be more responsive not just to the third wave of Covid-19, but other public health issues.

Leadership and communication

Lara spends a lot of her day facilitating the appropriate transfer of information, making herself available basically 24/7 to 'troubleshoot' a wide variety of issues and providing structured knowledge and unfailing enthusiasm for innovation.

She leads projects, both in terms of the vision, but also by becoming intricately involved in the detail. She can then be effective at all levels, from leadership through to IT support through to clinicians and staff on the floor.

She is one of the early adopters of a joint clinical and IT role in a DHB, showing clinicians that it is possible to lead in this field while working clinically and showing IT colleagues that a clinician can not only lead IT developments, but can offer worthwhile day-to-day insights and direction.

With each project she is involved in, Lara gently but firmly pushes the team forward. She is instrumental in keeping projects moving when things don't appear to be progressing or are hitting roadblocks. 

She is a leader in developing respectful relationships with industry partners and working alongside them to achieve common goals. 

At times she appears to be ubiquitous as she is essential to such a large number of initiatives.

Lara knows the skills and strengths of everyone in her network and inspires all to do what they can to provide better systems for clinicians and patients. She is always first to acknowledge the good work of others and looks for ways to reward teams for a job well done.

A regional approach

Lara has acknowledged expertise and understanding of how healthcare ties together, especially in the Northern Region.

She has led regional eReferrals work and the Regional Clinical Portal Operating Model (ROM) group, which involves leading and working alongside service leaders/clinicians, DHB and healthAlliance subject matter experts, and industry partners to manage incoming requests and resources

Through these roles, developments at Waitematā DHB are able to be spread across the region.

There are marked differences in managerial styles across the Northern Region DHBs, but Lara has quietly worked away at getting people to talk to one another, and understand where others are coming from. 

Leadership doesn't have to be showy, and she demonstrates this continually, often acting as the 'glue' that binds together different disciplines, and people with different views. 

This profile is an edited version of the nomination/s.

Click here to vote for the winner of the Clinical Informatics Leadership Award 2020.

If you would like to provide feedback on the above feature article please contact the editor Rebecca McBeth.

Read more CiLN Award 2020 finalists:

Karen Blake
Victoria Brevoort

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