Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust emerged as ‘trust or health board of the year’ at the 10th annual EHI Awards last night.
And Dr Masood Nazir, the Birmingham GP who is the national clinical lead for the Patient Online programme, received the CCIO award for clinical informatics leadership.
The trust and the CCIO were unveiled alongside eight other award winners at a black tie dinner at the Lancaster Hotel in London, hosted by comedian Ruby Wax. The full list of winners was:
The CCIO award for clinical informatics leadership – Dr Masood Nazir
Best use of IT to support integrated healthcare services – King’s Health Partners and Lambeth and Southwark clinical commissioning groups
Excellence in healthcare business analytics – Wrightington Wigan and Leigh NHS Foundation Trust
Digital NHS trust or health board of the year – Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust
Best use of IT to support clinical treatment and care – University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust
Healthcare and IT product innovation – TPP and its academic and research partners for an electronic frailty index
Best use of IT to support healthcare business efficiency – South West London Pathology and Orion Health
Best use of IT to promote patient safety – NHS Fife
Excellence in mobile healthcare – South Central Ambulance Service, Ortivus and Quicksilva
Best use of technology to share information with patients and carers – Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust and Propagator.
Salford Royal is headed by Sir David Dalton, and has become known as a leader in work to improve quality in the NHS. It is also one of the most prominent ‘vanguard’ sites tasked with developing the new models of care set out in the Five Year Forward View.
The trust has worked closely with Allscripts, deploying its Sunrise Clinical Manager system in 2013, in support of its ambition to become “the safest trust in the country” and to open up records to patients via a portal. The award recognised it's work developing an intgrated health roadmap.
Salford's Bob Young, who described himself as "effectively CCIO from 1990s to this year" and who has just retired, said: "It has been a wonderful journey. I am very pleased to have won for the integrated health roadmap because I am a diabetologist and I have always thought of the electronic record as the glue to delivering better care."
Dr Nazir has been a GP for 15 years and works at the Our Health Partnership super-practice in Birmingham. He is the chief information officer of NHS Birmingham CrossCity CCG, which has helped to develop the pan-city Your Care Connected shared care record.
He is also national clinical lead for the Patient Online programme, which has been driving online access to GP records, booking and repeat prescriptions in England.
Accepting his award last night, Nazir said: "It is amazing. I do not know if anybody from primary care has won this award before but it shows what primary care leadership can achieve. It is all about bringing people together. This shows what can be achieved when they do come together."
The EHI Awards, which are now run by Informa, are the only dedicated healthcare IT awards in the UK. Ruby Wax was invited to chair not only because they are traditionally hosted by a comedian, but because of her work to raise awareness of mental health issues.
Dave Panther, sales director at Informa, said: "Tonight is about celebrating the fantastic entrants and this year's winners for the innovative work they are doing in the healthcare sector … for the benefit of hospitals, clinicians and most importantly patients."
Read more: Read our interview with Dr Masood Nazir, in which he discusses his career, the progress of Patient Online, and why primary care needs more chief clinical information officers.