CIO Interview: William Smart, NHS CIO

Smart discusses his role overseeing the technology underpinning health and social care in England, focusing on the new NHS Digital Academy

William Smart, CIO of the NHS, describes his role as "peculiar". Not only does he oversee the technology underpinning the NHS, but he has a "special mandate" from the Deparment of Health, giving him a remit across social care, which sits outside of the NHS.

This means his jobs covers a vast array of disparate organisations.

"I sit across the whole of the health and social care system," says Smart. "My job is to use technology to try to join up health and care, and its delivery across organisations within England."

It's hard to fully grasp the scale of the task until you start looking at the figures.

The NHS cares for over a million patients every 24 hours. In England there are 236 secondary care trusts, and 7,500 GP practices. There are a million staff working for the NHS, and the UK spends spend about £125 billion a year on healthcare. Whereas social care has over 1.5 million people working in it across 20,000 organisations, with about £20 billion being spent on it each year.

"We are an immense organisation," says Smart. "The challenge we have is that those organisations are often independent. They're part of the NHS but they have their own boards and decision-making. And in terms of IT delivery within the strategic context, they manage and run their own IT infrastructure.

"My job is to work with colleagues across the whole of the health and social care system to try to drive transformation through the use of technology."

He emphasises the importance of relationships in making this happen.

"We work as part of a system, and if you speak to my counterparts we'll always talk about the importance of relationships, whether locally or nationally."

One of Smart's passions currently is attempting to professionalise the CIO community. One way the NHS is attempting to reach this goal is via the recent launch of the NHS Digital Academy.

"We recently announced the establishment of our digital academy led by Imperial College with Edinburgh University and Harvard Medical School. We have our first 100 CIOs about to start that course in the next few weeks. That for us is a way to effectively kitemark our CIOs, to say this is somebody who's been through a structured programme, who understands informatics and how informatics works in a health and care environment, and that the boards of organisations can have confidence in.

"We're also working with professional bodies through the digital academy and other routes to professionally accredit CIOs as well."

This sort of formalisation of the CIO position is necessary, according to Smart, because CIOs traditionally haven't had such a structure.

"Traditionally the CIO profession has been built through experience. It's almost been a process of apprenticeship. You hang around long enough and you get to a senior position.

"We want to do two other things through the academy. One is to provide academic and intellectual rigour. We need to ensure in the NHS that we're learning from the best in the world. That means the best healthcare systems, the best from other industries, and also from academic research around the real impact that informatics and IT and digital can have to our industry. That's the formal education piece.

"The second piece is we often learn most from others, so this is partly about building networks. One of the elements of the digital academy will be a project, this is an opportunity to learn from what people in other organisations are doing.

"People who have been through the Digital Academy will have a post-graduate certificate from the course. And they'll also come out with an accreditation that will say they are an accredited health Chief Information Officer."

Watch the video for more.

Smart is 11th in Computing's IT Leaders 100 rankings for 2018.

This article is sponsored by Workday