EHealth Insider has sent a second open letter to health secretary Andrew Lansley urging him to support the EHI CCIO Campaign.
The campaign is calling for every NHS provider organisation to consider appointing a chief clinical information officer to lead on IT and information to improve patient care.
It launched in July with an open letter to Lansley urging him to back the idea of clinical champions as part of his promise to unleash an ‘Information Revolution’ for staff and patients.
Since then, it has attracted the support of the majority of the royal medical colleges, important professional groups such as the BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, suppliers and EHI readers – who can still show their support by signing the petition on the EHI CCIO Campaign web-pages.
It has also seen a model job description drawn up by BCS and the first appointments made by trusts. The latest open letter urges Lansley to build on this momentum by including support for the development of CCIOs in the forthcoming NHS information strategy.
“The professions and the information community alone cannot achieve the step-change required,” says the letter signed by EHI editor Jon Hoeksma.
“I am therefore writing to urge you to include the importance of clinical leadership in information – through supporting the creation and development of CCIO’s – in your department’s forthcoming information strategy.”
The first trusts to appoint clinicians to CCIO roles were announced as Oxford Radcliffe, South London and The Rotherham at EHI Live 2011.
In a session to discuss the CCIO role at the conference in Birmingham this week, two members of the audience announced they had also been appointed as CCIOs.
Lansley took the unusual step of issuing a personal note of support for the campaign in response to the first three appointments, saying “clinical leadership is critical to making health service information as a tool for improving outcomes” and urging others to “learn from the benefits” delivered by the first CCIOs.
EHI will continue to support the campaign by developing a national CCIO network and a programme of events to promote the idea and support emerging CCIOs.
© 2011 EHealth Media.
The BCS Primary Health Care Specialist Group are delighted to back the EHI call for clinical engagement at board level, their CCIO campaign. We have long pushed for recognition that health informatics is now an essential part of health care, and needs top level clinical involvement.
Through our work with the NHS we recognise that it is fundamentally important for IT projects to be clinically driven from the outset to ensure their success, and that’s why BT is delighted to support E-Health Insider’s campaign. Never before has there been a better time for IT to really make a difference to the NHS and the creation of this new role will ensure IT remains high on the agenda and clinically led.
It's blindingly obvious that one is needed.
Simples
The Royal College of Anaesthetists is happy to endorse the campaign for Chief Clinical Information Officers in NHS Trusts. In an environment of growing innovation for information generation in the healthcare environment, it is vital that integration of systems and coordination of effort is seen as paramount to ensure good communication and appropriate data security – the CCIO role will be vital to provide professional management and patient reassurance.
Clinical leadership of IT is essential to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past and bring healthcare IT into the 21st century.
Delighted to see this campaign receive the level of support it so richly deserves from so many of the Royal Colleges and other professional groups. The change that the campaign will hopefully bring about is long overdue. Well done to EHI for organising.For what it%u219s worth, as a public health doctor and registered health informatician, I fully support the campaign.Better intelligence = better decisions = better healthDr Brendan O%u219BrienUKCHIP Level 3
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