Highland Marketing gives full support to EHI’s CCIO campaign

Highland Marketing has offered its full support to eHealth Insider’s chief clinical information officer (CCIO) campaign.

The national campaign, which was launched in July 2011, calls for every NHS provider organisation to appoint a chief clinical information officer. This would ensure that NHS information projects do more than simply take clinicians with them: they need to be designed and led by clinicians, which is crucial in improving the systems that they use to meet their requirements and improve quality of care.

As one of the UK’s leading healthcare PR and Marketing agencies, Highland Marketing hears numerous stories from its client base where clinical leadership has been essential to ensuring IT systems work for clinicians and their patients. Highland Marketing has therefore offered the following endorsement:

“The CCIO idea is excellent and deserves to succeed.

We work with a whole range of healthcare IT companies and believe that having CCIOs would be a superb way to ensure that NHS organisations invest in the technology that will deliver for the specific needs of their patients, staff and geographical areas.
We constantly hear of stories that come from deployments where success is based on talking to clinicians and understanding their needs. Providing a clinical information officer at decision-making level will help to ensure that there is deep clinical engagement engrained into NHS IT at every level to ensure these needs are met.

Well done for getting this campaign up and running and with such a huge amount of support.”

Also endorsing the campaign, Ravi Kumar, industry advisor to Highland Marketing said:

“I think EHI’s CCIO Campaign has the potential to help the NHS embrace the power of information at the point of decision making by the decision makers and care providers. Information Technology in the NHS is constantly bringing many new clinical tools to the work environment of the end users and clinicians, but so far there are only a few clinical champions who are embracing these and leading the way.

Successful Healthcare Information Technology (HIT) projects demand significant involvement and leadership from all clinicians, ultimately they are the beneficiaries along with the patients as they impact the care delivery and outcomes. In every healthcare organisation there are many projects and often there are significant key roles played by administrators/managers etc, but the impact of a successful HIT project is totally different when that key role is played by a clinician assuming the role of a champion.

Many clinicians are interested in playing key roles in HIT projects, but I feel, not every clinician will make a good champion. A good clinical champion needs skills with a strong focus on people, policy and process, they need to come into the role with an open mind to learn from other stakeholders and lead.

I wish EHI and the NHS every success in the CCIO campaign.”

Highland Marketing will continue to encourage its clients to support the CCIO campaign and the website can be found at: http://www.ehi.co.uk/campaign/ccio/list/