Today I am at Digital Health Summer Schools celebrating 10 years of these now legendary annual meetings. It started as a relatively small affair held at Emanuel College Oxford.
How it all started
The brainchild of Jon Hoeksma, Editor of what was then the online magazine E-Health Insider. The concept that the NHS required Chief Clinical Information Officers emerged from the wreckage of The National Programme for IT in the NHS.
The programme had largely failed because clinical engagement was something of an afterthought, and we wanted to make sure that in the future, clinicians would be at the heart of health IT developments.
It was my honour to chair that initial meeting and it is notable that it was such a small gathering that the first session was given over to the delegates introducing themselves, and as an ice-breaker, everyone performed a small IT-related Haiku (short poem).
I was very excited by the potential of the gathering and said to the audience:
“Can you feel it? Can you feel the power of this network?”
Did they really feel it?
People giggled nervously, they didn’t see themselves as powerful, we were just nerdy doctors with a mad idea that we might use computers to cure cancer and schizophrenia, weren’t we?
Well, after 2 days of networking, inspirational speakers and a lecture on the power of “End User Knowledge Networks” by a director of The Uptime Institute, who had done for the data centre industry what we were trying to do for health IT, people began to feel it.
When I closed the meeting, I asked them again, “Can you feel it?” No giggling this time, just an agreement to come again next year and to bring a friend.
The preparation for the 10-year anniversary
I immediately wrote an article about the Summer School, and re-reading it in advance of this year’s 10-year anniversary celebrations. I am struck by how similar the themes we are preoccupied with now are to what I wrote back then.
The failure of systems to interoperate, the disjointed nature of care, and the requirement to establish open standards to allow the free movement of health data to follow patients all get a mention.
Back in 2013, I was still a practicing NHS Consultant and wasn’t to know that that meeting would spawn the CIO network, CNIO Network, a thriving online community, discourse with 6,000 members that would outlast NHS Connecting for Health, The Health and Social Information Centre, NHS Digital, NHSX etc.
This year I have been navigating the health and care system with my 92-old mother and experiencing how hard it is for organisationally and geographically distributed Multidisciplinary Teams to collaborate on the shattered jigsaw of her records.
I am no longer working directly for the NHS but I am still trying to make a difference for the NHS.
Meet us at the Summer Schools event
This year I am attending with colleagues from Parsek who have developed an MDT tool called Vitally, which is doing great things for complex MDTs in the Netherlands and soon here in the UK.
Do come and see us at the Summer Schools event on 27-28 July! I will be there personally with my colleague Pippa Lane.
Anyway, can you feel it?
Prof. Joe McDonald, Medical Director at Parsek
Views are my own and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organisation, employer or company.