Charlene Tan-Smith: Clinical Informatics Leadership Award 2023 finalist

eHealthNews.nz: Clinical Informatics

Charlene Tan-Smith: Clinical Informatics Leadership Award 2023 finalist

Thursday, 19 October 2023

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PROFILE - Charlene Tan-Smith, Allied Health clinical Informatics manager, Te Whatu Ora – Waitaha Canterbury & Te Tai o Poutini West Coast

Judge’s quote
“Tan-Smith has worked to bridge the divide between hospital and community, partnering with the Hauora Māori Team to ensure codesigned solutions. She demonstrates the ability to think creatively at the strategic level while also solving problems systematically at the micro level. Tan-Smith’s clinical informatics leadership ranges from leading the leaders to applied informatics.”

Nominator’s quote
“Tan- Smith's energy and desire to bring people along to achieve and celebrate successes, have led to a growth in enthusiasm for informatics, data and digital within all the Allied Health specialities, managers and clinicians across multiple campuses.”

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Profile
Charlene Tan-Smith has recently been appointed Allied Health clinical informatics manager, for Te Whatu Ora covering Waitaha Canterbury and Te Tai o Poutini West Coast. She is the clinical lead for the South Island Ketogenic Service, and clinical director and co-founder of KetoSuite.

She recently completed her doctorate of professional practice, where she applied a theoretical framework of acceptability to a suite of medicalised ketogenic technology.

Her work has led to successful pilots and projects in Waitaha Canterbury, such as the closed-loop digital referral acknowledgement system, passive data gathering, and dashboard reporting for Allied Health operational visibility.

She contributes actively to the community of clinical informatics and leads her allied health workforce at Canterbury as they co-design, engage with, and implement digital solutions across a range of professions and sectors.

Stakeholder engagement
Tan-Smith has been a passionate digital health participant for many years. As part of her dietetics specialist interest in epilepsy and ketogenic diets she independently developed and refined a digital solution, KetoSuite, for her local consumers that now aids ketogenic practitioners in New Zealand, Canada and the United Kingdom.

She always has the consumer at the centre of her treatment, service and digital developments and has consistently worked with the families who use the digital solution to implement and integrate their feedback.

Tan-Smith emphasises stakeholder engagement for any project she is involved in, starting with awareness raising and continuing through to communication of deployment and feedback.

One example is the closed-loop digital referral acknowledgement system where she supported and led the eHealth team and Allied Health specialities through a fail-fast agile development for the pilot and on to a successful completion and deployment of the system.

Tan-Smith needed to achieve buy-in from seven Allied Health specialities, managers and staff and achieve a high level of stakeholder engagement for them to complete the necessary tasks to contribute to success.

She provided early clear communication of the goals of the project and the benefits to each department of the resulting data and how they could access and use it operationally. In addition, she demonstrated through a pilot that data was digitally collected passively without burdening staff, with existing workflows primarily retained.

Tan-Smith partnered with the Hauora Māori team to ensure an appropriate and custom fit for their unique operational workflows and challenges in measuring activity. All Allied Health departments completed their documentation tasks within the target timeframe, and the system went live on time.

Clinical leadership
Tan-Smith's clinical informatics leadership ranges from providing campus or regional informatics strategies for informing decision-makers, to using systematic approaches to solving technical and operational challenges of data collection, reporting and interpretation.

She has provided technical strategy direction for implementing standardised but localised Cortex forms between the Christchurch Hospital and Burwood campuses. This ensures future-proofing for these and other campuses in development, governance, and reporting on the platform for passively gathering data to represent acute demand and shortfalls for Allied Health to inform operational decision-making.

The decision-making around how to achieve standardisation of data with the deployment of Cortex to the Burwood campus is an example of higher-level strategy decisions that will have ongoing and future impact on other campuses and the regions.

This required leadership to effectively explain complex technical issues to decision-makers and communicate what was the best course of action and why.

Her work has led to Christchurch Hospital being the first to report Hauora Māori community activity datasets systematically.