CiLN Award 2020 finalist – Karen Blake - Health Informatics New Zealand

eHealthNews.nz: Clinical Informatics

CiLN Award 2020 finalist – Karen Blake

Tuesday, 20 October 2020

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FEATURE – eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

Karen Blake, head of clinical informatics, healthAlliance

Judge’s comment

“Karen’s nomination identifies her as a passionate and committed advocate of clinical informatics. She is endorsed for her excellent leadership skills and emphasis is made of her ability to build trusted relationships across boundaries.

“Leading from the front, Karen has participated in a wide range of regional and national projects, whilst her clinical background influences her approach in all that she achieves. She is identified as a visible champion for clinicians working across technology and digital health.”

Nominator quotes

“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.”

“Excellent leadership relies on excellent communication and Karen is clear, diligent and resourceful in her communication abilities.”

Profile

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

She sits on the Health Informatics NZ board and the nHIP sector advisory group. She provides national expertise on health data through her involvement on the board of HL7NZ, and sits on the Ministry of Health's Health Information Standards Organisation and Digital Identity Advisory Group.

Karen co-led the establishment of New Zealand's Clinical Informatics Leadership Network (CiLN), which now has more than 400 members across the country.

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.

Previously in midwifery clinical practice for over 20 years in both New Zealand and Australia, she is now a first responder working in the community as a volunteer rural operational Firefighter.

Championing clinical informatics

Karen established the first clinical informatics team in New Zealand to address regional informatics needs, designed roles and recruited appropriately experienced and trained informaticians.

She also led the development of the Clinical Informatics Position Statement in collaboration with other CiLN leaders, giving legitimacy and credibility to the clinical informatics profession.

She provides leadership as a service and is a resource for DHB CCIOs to develop their own enterprise-wide clinical informatics teams. She has extended this service to other organisations as part of her work in championing clinical informatics teams at local and regional levels.

She gives people a platform on which to perform well, recognises the expertise that others bring to the clinical informatics workforce and supports the development of skills and networks for people to work together to solve problems and progress the work of clinical informatics.

Leading the Covid-19 response

Karen has shown exceptional leadership in response to the Covid-19 pandemic leading healthAlliance's Incident Management Response, 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.

She has been instrumental in developing and implementing rapid changes to the health system that enabled healthAlliance to respond to GPs and hospitals that needed to provide virtual consultations for patients and enable clinical and administrative teams to communicate and work remotely; as well as establishing the ICT services for the northern region’s Managed Isolation and Quarantine facilities and Community Testing Centres.

Building relationships

Communication is the foundation of inclusiveness. Karen is passionate about inclusiveness and communicates this passion clearly in a way that contributes strongly to the inclusive spirit of CiLN's leadership group and member body.

healthAlliance’s clinical informatics team relies heavily on building relationships with clinicians in the DHBs it serves. This in turn relies on excellent communication. Karen leads by example, championing strong and productive communication between clinicians and technology specialists.

Identifying the lack of diverse professional representation in most clinical process forums, Karen has reached out and developed relationships with many groups that have traditionally been left out. By bringing together what they have in common in core functions of a health record across services, she has helped break down silos created by professional groupings and departments.

Her boundary spanning skills are highly regarded and she has developed trust-based working relationships at the Ministry of Health as well as in the boards and committees on which she serves.

The CiLN network has helped support inter district health board collaboration, creating a joined up team of national informatics specialists working together and Karen's ability to collaborate has resulted in a strong CiLN relationship with leaders in DHBs, PHOs, HiNZ and MoH.

She has a vision to join up health care, data and functions, in a patient centred way.

The impact of her current data strategy work will be felt over the next years and will mean less duplication of effort between DHB and other health providers across the health system.