Lansley backs EHI CCIO Campaign

Health secretary Andrew Lansley

Health secretary Andrew Lansley has personally endorsed the EHI CCIO Campaign and urged others to learn from the first appointments announced this week.

His comments came two more CCIO appointments were confirmed in London and Manchester at EHI Live 2011.

Lansley sent a personal note congratulating eHealth Insider on the campaign, which was launched in July to encourage every NHS provider organisation to consider appointing a chief clinical information officer to lead on IT and information projects. 

He said: "Clinical leadership is critical to making health service information available as a tool for improving outcomes.

"The Information Revolution is all about making available information which is clinically relevant and meaningful to patients - chief clinical information officers are one way of achieving this.

“Congratulations to EHI for the progress made in its campaign. I am sure the NHS will want to learn from the benefits delivered by CCIOs in Oxford, South London and Rotherham."

The news of the first appointments to CCIO roles was announced overnight. Two consultants - at Oxford and South London - have taken on CCIO roles, and a physiotherapist has been appointed to lead in Rotherham.

News of two more appointments came as delegates discussed the CCIO role at EHI Live 2011 at the NEC in Birmingham.

They are Dr Phil Koczan, a part-time GP and former clinical informatics lead for NHS London who is now CCIO for UCL Partners, which brings together the NHS healthcare community across north east and north central London.

He said: “I will be building on existing projects to join up information across primary, acute, community and mental health and leading clinical engagement.”

He said he would focus on four areas: data for supporting patient care and integrated care; data across pathways; data for commissioning and data for transparency.

Meanwhile, Dr Rhidian Bramley, a consultant radiologist at The Christie Hospital in Manchester, has been appointed as CCIO to lead on implementing a new electronic patient record at the specialist cancer trust.

John Glover, deputy CIO at The Christie, told EHI that Dr Bramley will be involved in selecting the new EPR, providing clinical leadership and developing clinical engagement.

He said: “We had increasingly realised the importance of achieving clinical engagement and had been arguing internally for this over the last two years.”

The EHI CCIO Campaign came at the right time, he added. “When we saw that we were aligned with what others were doing, it helped to add support internally.”

At the EHI Live 2011 session, EHI editor Jon Hoeksma promised that the campaign will keep on running to build on this early success.

The initiative now has the support of 11 royal medical colleges, with the Royal College of Surgeons endorsing it last week.

More than 40 suppliers have added their support, along with professional organisations such as BCS Health, the BMA and the NHS Confederation, and dozens of EHI readers.

EHI is to send a second open letter to Lansley tomorrow, asking him to include the CCIO role within the forthcoming information strategy. BCS Health has published a draft job description and is working on help to support clinicians who want a career in informatics.

Hoeksma said: “We now need to bring some substance to the campaign and to provide some support for those who are already in these roles and those who would like to come into them. We need to work with our partners and to build on the goodwill.”