What key skills or attributes do you consider have contributed to your success in this role?
I have tried to combine three things in my career and stay up to date in them all: medicine, technology and healthcare. It is easy to move from one thing to the next, it’s much harder to keep current in them all and try to be greater than the sum of the parts of your knowledge.
Understanding and working between these domains has enabled me to spot opportunities and innovate.
– Medicine: I have tried to stay current in medicine and not lose the original passion that caused me to train as a doctor in the first place through organisations such as the BMJ and NICE.
– Technology: I have tried to look for the technologies that can make a real difference, even if it has required me to change employers and learn new skills. When I first started, the technology was clunky and the opportunities lived in the imagination of enthusiasts. Over the past two decades cloud technology, federated architectures and machine learning have moved information technology to the forefront of every healthcare setting.
– Healthcare: I have tried to understand healthcare as a complex system of people, processes and technology and understand the interplay between these things in order to deliver transformative outcomes for patients.
What level of data maturity do you typically encounter across your client base and what tends to hold this back?
Although it has taken time, over the 20 years I have seen the progress we have made in leveraging digital solutions to support the health and care environment, in the UK and across the world. While not complete, I do feel we have reached a stage where data being captured in digital format is no longer the limiting factor, instead we are hampered by our ability to deal with data quality, integrate the increasingly diverse types of data and then use it for decision making and impacting care.