Kim Ashall trained and worked as a physiotherapist in the NHS before going on to a management training scheme, from which she graduated in 1997. After working in various jobs, including the roll out of Choose and Book in South Yorkshire, she was appointed as director of service improvement at The Rotherham Foundation Trust.

Jack Barker is a Respiratory and General Physician at Kings College Hospital. He trained at the Middlesex Hospital and undertook research in occupational asthma the National Heart and Lung Institute, London. His clinical interests include tuberculosis and lung cancer. He was clinical lead for respiratory medicine at King’s for seven years.

He has always been interested in improving processes and making life easier for the clinical staff. He started working with electronic patient record programme at Kings in 1999 and has been associated with it ever since. He was made Clinical Director for IT (CCIO) at Kings in 2009. Significant achievements that he has been associated with include extensive use of electronic prescribing at Kings, bedside clinical noting and use of real-time electronic reports to support high quality clinical care. He has worked closely with the venous thromboembolism team and infection control teams to assist them in their work. He runs a specialty IT system for the respiratory service at Kings.

Current focus of the work at Kings is to make the whole system paperless and in particular to incorporate an electronic clerking and electronic vital signs monitoring. Kings is part of an academic health science system so joining up the parts of the system will also be a key activity over the coming months.

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Giulio was a Consultant Cardio-thoracic surgeon at three of London teaching hospitals and the Clinical Director for service transformation at South London Healthcare. After graduating in Italy he completed general and specialist surgical training in the US, Italy and the UK. He was a Consultant at the European Medicines Agency, and an editor at the British Medical Journal. Before joining Cerner he was the CEO of Hepburn & Langley, a management consultancy firm specialised in service transformation and medical workforce management and planning.

Rhidian is CCIO at The Christie NHS Foundation Trust, Manchester. Among other things, he is also director of clinical radiology, a member of the trust’s informatics board, PACS lead for NHS Connecting for Health, and a former chair of the UK Imaging Informatics Group.

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Susan takes responsibility for the Patient and Public Involvement activity of the network. Additionally for the past two and half years, she has held the post of Director of Nursing, Midwifery and Allied Health Professionals at Connecting for Health, where she is part of a clinical team with responsibility for developing informatics capability across the whole of the NHS. As a nurse herself, she also provides clinical leadership around the nurse workforce, which is so crucial to the delivery of the Clinical Research Network objectives. Susan is the author of “Achieving Evidence-Based Practice” and “Leadership and Management: A Three-Dimensional Approach”. She is a Fellow of the Queens Nursing Institute.

Professor Jonathan Kay is Clinical Informatics Director at the NHS Commissioning Board. Before that he was a Consultant Chemical Pathologist at the Oxford University Hospitals and Visiting Professor of Health Informatics at the Centre for Health Informatics, City University London. He has been Chairman of the Information Group of the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges and was a senior consultant to the Design Authority of the NHS National Programme for IT for England.

He is currently working on improved processes for computerised requesting for central-laboratory testing in the Oxford EPR implementation. This won the 2012 HSJ Award for “Improving Care with Technology” and the 2012 National Patient Safety Award for “Technology and IT to improve Patient Safety”.

Phil has a long track record in general practice, IT and informatics. A GP for 18 years, he has also taken on various clinical advisory roles to Torex (which merged with iSoft in 2003), BT and the London Programme for IT.

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General Practitioner - Eric Moore Partnership Cheshire

Chair and Founder - NHS Clinical Leaders Network

Medical Director - Integral Healthcare UK

NCL-Commissioning - DH Informatics Directorate

Dr Raj Kumar is the Chair of the NHS Clinical Leaders Network, a frontline network of senior NHS Clinicians and one of the largest multi-professional leadership networks of over 4000 Senior Clinicians across England.

A frontline General Practitioner from Cheshire, he has pioneered clinician-led innovative changes in healthcare delivery with a continued emphasis on Quality, Innovation and Efficiency both locally and nationally. The community based organisation that he has established now covers primary and secondary care services from over 14 sites across 6 cluster Primary Care Trust regions and continues to grow nationally. The organisation has won many an award for innovation and leadership in healthcare and continues to develop cost effective integrated healthcare delivery models that fully support the current vision of the proposed Health and Social Care Bill.

Nationally, Dr Kumar has pioneered IT initiatives that include electronic booking across primary and secondary care and helped support the development of Choice and Informatics requirements for its delivery. He continues to remain part of the Clinical leadership team at the Department of Health Informatics Directorate and also works closely in an advisory and senior leadership capacity with the NHS Commissioning development team at the Department of Health.

Dr Kumar’s previous NHS leadership roles include those of Associate Medical Director for World Class Commissioning as well as being a National Clinical Lead for the NHS Modernisation Agency, Choice and Choose and Book and NHS Connecting for Health’s lead clinician for the Map of Medicine project.

Dr Kumar passionately supports clinical leadership and continued clinician empowerment in supporting a “patient-centred, clinician-led NHS”.

As chief medical officer, Dr. Litt is responsible for providing strategic insight to Dell’s healthcare solutions so that healthcare organizations, medical professionals and patients can realize the benefits of information-driven healthcare. Dr. Litt understands firsthand the importance of a connected healthcare ecosystem and the power of information to streamline healthcare administration, coordinate and improve patient care and to ultimately deliver personalized medicine. Before he joined Dell, Dr. Litt was the head of Litt Healthcare Ventures. Prior to that, he served as executive vice president/vice dean and chief of staff of New York University Langone Medical Center. Before assuming his EVP role, Dr. Litt was vice chair for financial affairs in the medical center’s radiology department. Dr. Litt is a board-certified neuroradiologist and fellow of the American College of Radiology, with recognized expertise in neurovascular imaging. A graduate of Brown University, Dr Litt went on to receive his medical degree and complete his internship, residency and fellowship at New York University.

John Lockley is currently a part-time GP in Ampthill, Bedfordshire; Clinical Lead for Informatics at Bedfordshire CCG; chair of iSUG, the independent CSC Primary Care User Group; a member of the National Clinical Reference Panel for Choose and Book; a member of the GPES advisory panel and Joint Implementation Board; and primary care clinical coordinator for the Midlands and East MedeAnalytics Programme.

Dr William Lumb is lead GP (3 days/week) in Sedbergh, a busy rural Yorkshire Dales practice since 2004. He started with health informatics in 2007, and was appointed Clinical Lead Informatics for NHS Cumbria in 2010. He currently works across most healthcare sectors in Cumbria, being Senior Responsible Officer & budget holder for numerous IT programmes along with presently being acting Head of Informatics for Cumbria CCG. He has been developing a national voice on Health Informatics, including membership of the national CCIO Advisory Panel.

William is otherwise active in Pre-Hospital & Rescue Medicine, being Team Doctor Swaledale Mountain Rescue Team.

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Dr Joe McDonald is a practising NHS consultant psychiatrist. Over the past five years, he has been an NHS trust medical director and national clinical lead for IT at NHS Connecting for Health – a stint that included 18 months as medical director of the Lorenzo delivery team. His experiences in the National Programme for IT in the NHS have left him with a passion for usability and “end user knowledge networks.” He is the founding chairman of the National Mental Health Informatics Network; motto: we don’t get fooled again.

Dr Jonathan Richardson is Northumberland, Tyne and Wear NHS Foundation Trust’s clinical director of informatics, and the remaining three he is a consultant in old age psychiatry. As well as his local roles at Northumberland, Tyne and Wear, he is chair of the Royal College of Psychiatrists informatics committee and chair of the North East Clinical Health Informatics Forum.

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John Williams is Professor of Health Services Research at the College of Medicine, Swansea University, and Consultant Gastroenterologist at Abertawe Bro Morgannwg University Health Board. From 2002-07 he was Director of R&D for Wales, a post in which he established the Clinical Research Collaboration in Wales (CRC Cymru). This collaboration includes an innovative Health Information Research Unit at Swansea University where linked data from many sources in health and social care are being used for observational and prospective research.

He has a long-standing interest in improving information systems that support patient care and directs the Health Informatics Unit at the Royal College of Physicians of London, which he established in 2001. He has evaluated the use of routinely collected data to support research, audit and professional appraisal. This work has highlighted the need for standardisation of the structure and content of patients’ records from a clinical perspective and, at the Royal College of Physicians he has led the development of evidence- and consensus-based standards for hospital admission records and communications. This work was supported by NHS Connecting for Health and the standards have been endorsed by the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges. His research interests also include the development and evaluation of new models of service delivery, particularly in gastroenterology, and the greater involvement of patients in the process. He presently chairs a Board Subgroup for the UKCRC, to raise public awareness of the benefits of patient data being used for research, and is a member of the NIHR Health Services Research Board.

Wai Keong is a Haematology Registrar in the North London Rotation who has just completed the NHS Medical Director Leadership and Management fellowship. He also sits on the EHI CCIO Leaders Network advisory panel where he was the inaugural chair. He is an active participant at the NHS Hackdays and can be heard bi-weekly on the Digital Doctor podcast on iTunes. He also led the joint BCS and DH project on creating guidance for safe keeping of electronic health and social records. (www.nhs.uk/records)