Clinical informatics needs networks

The development of chief clinical information officers and health informatics professionals requires sustained investment in networks and professionalism, says NHS England’s clinical informatics director.

Speaking two weeks into his new job, and at his first public event, Professor Jonathan Kay said there was an urgent requirement to raise the calibre and professional status of clinical informatics across the board.

He said one pernicious urban myth first needs to be tackled: “One of the questions I want to tackle is, ‘why is there a view that doctors are luddites?’ They are not luddites. If you give them something of value they will snap it up.”

Professor Kay said that a priority for his newly formed team to address is the lack of professionalisation within health informatics. He aims to lead by example and do his own personal revalidation in informatics.

He also intends to invest in supporting clinical informatics networks as a mechanism to exchange knowledge and best practice.

“Healthy networks are where people know each other and that relationship enables you to better solve problems,” said Professor Kay.

Referring to the CCIO Leaders Network, he said: “We have to rely on people like EHI to get us together. It’s great to be here, but shouldn’t we be doing it ourselves?"

He stressed that clinical informatics lags far behind the professionalism of other clinical disciplines.

“In my specialty of laboratory medicine it’s highly professionalised, but in clinical informatics you have to take a deep breath and explain what you do.”

Professor Kay said the major exception was the CCIO role, which had begun to put clinical informatics on the map.

“People are starting to recognize what the CCIO role is and that’s laudable, and people get what a CCIO is doing. But for all other clinical informatics roles we need to do much, much more.”

In tandem with professionalisation he said there was a pressing need for networks to spread knowledge and best practice.

“We don’t need any great new inventions, what we need is much faster implementation and adoption,” he explained.

A part of this challenge is to “dramatically improve the currently very poor standards of evaluation and publication.”

“We have to produce higher quality evidence of effectiveness of clinical IT – it’s complex, but we can do a lot better than we do at the moment.”

“Connecting for Health did fund some high quality evaluations in areas like telemedicine, we have to do more of that.”

Professor Kay will be speaking at the inaugural CCIO Summer School at Lincoln College, Oxford on 4-5 July.