The NHS Commissioning Board has appointed a clinical informatics director to "provide clinical leadership on the best use of informatics."
The part-time role has been filled by Professor Jonathan Kay, a consultant chemical pathologist at Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust and visiting professor of health informatics at the Centre for Health Informatics, City University London.
Professor Kay is probably best known for its work on blood tracking at Oxford University Hospitals.
The trust’s implementation of the Olympus BloodTrack system, which used barcode labelling and bedside scanning to improve the safety of blood transfusions, won a number of national awards and was supposed to be an exemplar for others to follow.
Professor Kay went on to be a senior consultant to the Design Authority of the National Programme for IT in the NHS.
Tapping into a quite different way of doing healthcare IT, he also attended the recent NHS Hack Day Oxford.
There, his group created ‘Active Letter’, a system that lets hospitals send discharge letters to GPs securely on the N3 network.
The position, which was advertised by the commissioning board in December last year, will be a chief clinical information officer-type role.
In a statement, the NHS CB said: "The clinical informatics director will champion the development of an information culture across the NHS, which will drive continuous clinical and process improvement and help to ensure safe and effective patient care.
"This will include providing clinical informatics advice to the board and contributing to an innovative national framework for the management of information across the NHS."
EHealth Insider ran a campaign to encourage all NHS organisations to appoint CCIOs to lead on IT and information projects in 2011, and has followed this up with the CCIO Leaders Network.
Then-health secretary Andrew Lansley was urged to create a national-level CCIO post as part of the latest reforms of the NHS, and to include CCIOs in the NHS information strategy, ‘The Power of Information.’
Lansley said at the launch of the CCIO Leaders Network that a CCIO on the new NHS CB would be a “jolly good idea.” But the new appointment is still a significant endorsement for the CCIO role.