With a background in nursing and managing most cancers providers, Elaine O’Brien understands how hospitals function. In her present position, she helps clinicians use knowledge to assist individuals be as wholesome as attainable. By Claire Read

Once Elaine O’Brien certified as a nurse, she didn’t anticipate that quickly her working days would contain detailed conversations about constructing requirements. But as a supervisor in most cancers providers within the early 2000s, a interval by which the New Labour authorities targeted consideration and funding on enhancing most cancers care, it grew to become inevitable.

“I had a lot of opportunity to reconfigure old buildings and commission new ones,” says O’Brien. “And I remember thinking: ‘I’m a nurse. What am I doing building a hospital ward?’”

The reply, she rapidly realised, was offering essential medical experience with an operational perspective. And when she received concerned in organising a brand new digital answer to help the administration of the providers, she started to know the worth of that.

“I went into it quite naïvely – I didn’t really understand digital services at the time. But I worked very closed with our IT team and learnt a huge amount from them. They didn’t really know clinical services, so my input was valuable to them too.”

It wasn’t the one realisation impressed by the mission. Working on the implementation of the system is when O’Brien found she actually favored knowledge.

“We were putting in the infrastructure around a system that managed patient waiting times, but suddenly the information became available to all of us,” she remembers.

“As a cancer manager I could sit back, look at the data, and go: ‘Oh, okay, there’s a trend here’, or: ‘There’s something happening in this service, we’re managing to get patients through much more quickly here versus over here. Why is that?’

Data-driven dialogue

“Suddenly I was able to see themes and that helped me then engage on a data-driven dialogue with clinicians within those services. So without having realised it when I helped install the system, it was actually a bit of a game changer.”

And in the end a sport changer for her profession, too. After a couple of years working in roles targeted on organisational redesign, after which in commissioning, a possibility got here up at Cerner (now Oracle Health).

“They didn’t recruit me because I knew about digital,” O’Brien says. “They recruited me because I knew how services ran. They knew I understood how a hospital operates, how the money flows. They knew I was interested in that transformation part of it – that I understood that if you just work with the digital folk without engaging clinical and operational folk, then you don’t succeed.

“Digital projects are all about people,” she continues. “You have to spend time building relationships and helping people understand the project, allowing them the space to share any fears in such a way that they then feel they can take that next step. Often the push back with a digital project is simply out of fear of the unknown.”

For O’Brien, although, the unknown tends to impress curiosity – and a want to know. It is a attribute to which she attributes her transfer into inhabitants well being administration, again in late 2015.

“It was accidental, really. I never plan anything, but I do ask questions. I want to know what’s coming next. I’m always excited about new opportunities. So we were bringing new population health products to the market at that time, and I wanted to find out more.”

It was notably intriguing as a result of it appeared to echo pursuits that had emerged earlier in her profession.

“When I was working in cancer services, we were trying to stop people coming into hospital unnecessarily. We were thinking about the pathway, about when and why you actually needed to be in hospital and when care could be successfully delivered outside hospital. It allowed people to spend as much time as possible with their families, and it made ill health a much smaller part of their life.

Pushing the boundaries

“If you think about population health management, it’s about how we can push boundaries further. How can we identify a pre-cursor to an illness and intervene before someone becomes ill and needs hospital care?

“It’s the same theme for me [as with my earlier work], and digital allows you to push further, to push the boundaries out all the time. That’s the bit that truly gets me excited.”

Specialising in inhabitants well being provided an opportunity to get correctly re-acquainted with one other ardour as nicely: knowledge.

“I’m interested in helping people to make the best possible use of the data that’s available to them – using the data to help people be as healthy as possible.”

Recently, that has included efforts to establish sufferers vulnerable to specific situations. “For example, we’ve built out algorithms to identify those that might be at risk of atrial fibrillation [in which the heart rate is irregular and can be abnormally fast; left untreated it can increase the risk of conditions such as stroke or heart failure].

“It’s identifying those things that can cause debilitation and therefore cost to the person, their family and to wider society – and intervening early to try to prevent it.”

With developments similar to shared care data, and the nationwide plans for knowledge integration, she sees extra alternatives than ever for this form of work. But to capitalise on these probabilities will, she believes, require a a lot wider understanding “of what can be done with data”.

O’Brien argues creating that understanding would require a multi-pronged strategy. She’d prefer to see social care grow to be extra digitised, and the idea of the CCIO introduced throughout to it – social employees changing into a hyperlink between fellow frontline workers and IT departments. At NHS organisations, she hopes CIOs and CCIOs will proceed to unfold the phrase.

“I think they have such an important role in educating their non-digital peers – not just clinical, but operational – on the art of the possible with data.

“Data is an asset. Clinical and operational leaders should be thinking about how to use it to full effect.”

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