Dr Ruth Agbakoba
digital transformation
Dr. Ruth Agbakoba has over 10 years global professional experience in health innovation, digital transformation, implementation science, informatics, and health systems research. She holds 1st Class Degree in Biomedical Informatics, Masters in Health Informatics, and PhD in Digital Health Innovation, Ruth pivoted into working in Medical AI and Natural Language Processing in 2019 as Honorary Research Fellow at University College London.
Ruth recently completed a Post-Doctoral Innovation Fellowship at New York University where she was leading on iCPR3: a US National Institute of Health (NIH) grant focused on designing and developing a nurse-led clinical decision support system (embedded within Electronic Patient Record) to tackle overprescribing of antibiotics for acute respiratory infections, whilst promoting better patient outcomes and responsible antibiotic stewardship.
Hirah Ahmed
digital clinical practice educator, Imperial College NHS Trust
Hirah is a Digital Clinical Practice Educator at Imperial College NHS Trust. Her role involves teaching and helping to develop digital workflows. Hirah’s past experience as a nurse includes working in Critical Care and Acute medicine.
Dr Majid Akram
CCIO, Primary Care, Lincolnshire ICB
Dr Majid Akram is Chief Clinical Information Officer (CCIO) for primary care in Lincolnshire ICB. He is a fellow of the NHS Digital Academy Leadership program (cohort 3). Working strategically with stakeholders on areas such as integration and digital technology implementation across Lincolnshire primary ICB. Involved in development of a virtual Multi-disciplinary team platform called vMDT.
The vMDT platform provides a workstation to schedule MDT cases and helps the team to communicate patient information securely, and allows them to undertake workflow related tasks between themselves. vMDT has been developed and used within community Heart Failure MDTs in Lincolnshire where the ICB was winner of the General practice awards 2023, in the category of best long term conditions project.
Areas of digital interest include: user centred design, pre and post evaluations to assess ROI, and workflow improvements for digital system users (amongst many other things). Always keen to share experiences with likeminded colleagues who have been immersed in deployment of digital technologies at scale. Also keen to discuss cycling with likeminded peddlers 🙂 You can connect on Linkedin.
Beenish Ali
lead directorate pharmacist, Essex & Kent North East London NHS FT
Beenish Ali is the Lead Directorate Pharmacist for Essex & Kent at NELFT. She has an extensive background of working in hospital pharmacy in the NHS and private sector. She works closely with system leaders and stakeholders to deliver on workforce planning, service development and transformation within Essex and Kent directorate in the organisation. Beenish is passionate about achieving strategic aims, workforce priorities and improving patient outcomes, aligned to national programmes.
Dr Lia Ali
clinical advisor, Transformation Directorate, NHS England
Dr Lia Ali is a doctor and digital health strategist with extensive experience across the spectrum of digital healthcare. She is passionate about ethics and safety by design, patient centred care and long term conditions including mental health and have particular interests in integrated care and medical education. She believes that delivery of exemplary healthcare requires a holistic, biopsychosocial, service design approach. Lia has done this via transformation roles in the NHS, charities & for-profit sector.
Dr Dan Alton
CCIO, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire West NHS ICB and national clinical advisor, Population Health Management, NHS England
As CCIO for Buckinghamshire Oxfordshire and Berkshire West ICB, Dan is responsible for the clinical leadership of the digital and data transformation across the ICS, ensuring that this is driven by patient, population and clinician need, and is embedded successfully ‘on-the-ground’.
He has been instrumental in helping design and deliver multiple large-scale digital and system transformation projects and longer-term strategies to create the governance and data infrastructure that enables this cultural change within systems.
He has a particular interest in Population Health Management methodology to drive the development of transformative approaches that lead to proactive, integrated care. He has supported this work locally, as well as nationally as National PHM Clinical Advisor to NHS England, and also internationally via his work with the WHO.
Rafiah Ansari
steering group member, Shuri Network; chief digital ethics and assurance officer, Surrey and Borderlands Partnership NHS FT
In addition to being a Shuri Network Steering Group Member, Rafiah is the Chief Digital Ethics and Assurance Officer at Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Foundation Trust which supports individuals with mental health and/or learning needs. This is the first role of its kind in the NHS and has the remit of ensuring best practice in health and care through digital safety, privacy, security and accessibility. By considering both legislative and moral duty, Rafiah is responsible for assuring the highest quality of digital and data solutions for NHS staff and service users.
Rafiah is also a clinical doctoral fellow funded by the National Institute of Health Research who invest in innovative projects led by NHS clinicians. As an NIHR fellow, she utilises almost two decades of knowledge and experience as a Paediatric Speech and Language Therapist to work with children who have language disorder and co-design evidence-based digital therapy tools. The fellowship involves collaboration between St George’s University Hospital Foundation Trust and City, University of London.
Tara Athanasiou
delivery lead (Humber) and EPaCCS digital Lead, ‘Humber and North Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership’
A senior digital health and transformation consultant, Tara has been working in the digital health space for over twenty years. She has held leadership positions in leading suppliers such as Dr Foster and ReStart Consulting and harnesses her experience to work in collaboration with health/care providers and systems to deliver meaningful change through the use of digital. Tara is currently one of the regional delivery leads for the shared care record programme in Humber and North Yorkshire ICS. She has also led the deployment of EPaCCS (Electronic Palliative Care Coordination System) in HNY, with this project recognised as best practice and published as a national NHS Blueprint.
Dr Mamta Bajre
lead health economist and methodologist, Health Innovation Oxford and Thames Valley
Mamta Joined in August 2018. She leads the market access team in value proposition development, health economic modelling & grant application writing. Mamta previously worked as health economist at the National Institute for Health and Care Research In Vitro Diagnostics Co-operative in London. She also has over six years experience as a medical doctor.
Dr Ameet Bakhai
director clinical research and CRIO, Royal Free London NHS FT and Co-founder AirEmail
NHS whole working life, cardiology day job, R&D director local and national UKRD group, first CRIO at Royal Free passionate about research and all therapeutic innovations – drugs, devices (pacing and stents), diagnostics (biomarkers and wearables) and digital (AI predictive algorithms and data insights and clinical pathways).
Have 1st ever Cerner heart failure pathway to nudge diagnoses (3-8x increased) and guidance prescribing (now top 10% adherence) and reduced mortality in hospital with 41,000 patient journeys data. Published >120 papers and used to observation to interventional research studies. recently on predicting arrhythmias and heart failure and now CVD from retinal imaging.
Dr Minal Bakhai
director for primary care transformation, NHS England
Dr Minal Bakhai is the Director for Primary Care Transformation at NHS England. She is a practicing GP, working at an inner-city London practice for over 12 years.
Minal has a unique portfolio with experience stretching across national policy, strategy, industry, research and leadership of large-scale change and digital transformation. Additionally, she has been an expert advisor at NICE appraising the effectiveness of health technology.
She is passionate about enabling high quality, sustainable primary and community services. Most recently enabling modern general practice and leading the national general practice improvement programme, which is evidence-led, data driven and deeply rooted in clinical practice – working in partnership with systems, PCNs, practices and communities to drive locally led transformation and improvement and support the realisation of the biggest benefits in the shortest timeframe.
Post-nominal letters: MBE, MBBS, BSc, MRCGP, MRCP, DFSRH, FFCI
Marko Balabanovic
chief technology officer, Our Future Health
Marko is the Chief Technology Officer for Our Future Health, joining late 2020 as the first technologist. He has recruited a team who have created and scaled a complex and reliable set of platforms to recruit volunteers, manage appointments for blood, produce quarterly data releases enabling scientific research in a trusted research environment and gain multiple security certifications. Our Future Health is the UK’s largest health research programme and still growing.
Previously, as Head of Innovation and AI at Huma, he was creating market-leading digital health technologies. He served 5 years on the board of NHS Digital, leading on technology and innovation. As Chief Technology Officer at Digital Catapult, he worked across technologies including machine learning, 5G, the internet of things, virtual and augmented reality and blockchain. Marko has been instrumental in bringing several new technologies to market. At a start-up called State he helped to launch a digital global opinion network. Formerly, Marko was Head of Innovation at lastminute.com, where his team launched an array of award-winning mobile apps. Marko studied Computer Science at Cambridge University and has a PhD in Computer Science (AI) from Stanford, where he led foundational work on recommender systems.
Helen Balsdon
interim CNIO, NHS England
Helen’s work seeks to ensure that nursing practice is supported by digital technology and data science and that nurses are equipped to work and lead in an digitally enabled environment. Helen is also responsible for the digital clinical safety strategy and interoperable medicines programme.
Prior to joining the team, Helen was CNIO/Head of Nursing at Cambridge University Hospitals. This was a strategic role working across the organisation providing clinical leadership for all aspects of informatics including adoption and use of new ways of working using technology.
Helen is passionate about using technology to support the delivery of high quality, evidence-based care and empowering patients in managing their own health record.
Nick Barlow
executive director of transformation, DrDoctor
Dave Belshaw
digital transformation director, Health Innovation North East & North Cumbria
Dave is a psychiatric nurse by trade and spent a large proportion of his career working in mental health community settings and teams. For the last 20 years Dave has worked in a variety of service improvement roles at regional and national level, specialising in complex programme management, leadership and strategy. For around ten years he was the CEO of a medium sized social enterprise (NEMHDU) specialising in research, evaluation and implementation of projects and programmes within mental health systems.
Dave is currently Digital Transformation Director at HI NENC. He is passionate about the impact digital and tech can play as an enabler to improving patient and staff care and experience, promoting digital inclusion and supporting innovation both from within and into the NHS and Social Care. Outside of work Dave and his family love the sea and have a variety of craft to explore and have fun.
Polly Bishop
healthcare partner, IBM consulting
Laura Bissell
lead digital midwife, Kettering General Hospital NHS FT
Laura Bissell has been a midwife for 10 years with a vast amount of experience and lead digital midwife for the past year. She has worked in all areas of midwifery including continuity. Laura is also a Professional Midwifery Advocate supporting staff and patients. Laura is passionate about implementing and supporting staff and patients with digital improvements to aid safe and effective care whilst supporting digital inclusion.
Prof Graeme Black
clinical geneticist and gen-o product owner, Manchester University NHS FT
Graeme is Professor of Genomics and Ophthalmology at The University of Manchester and Consultant Geneticist at Manchester University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. His major research interest is the investigation of genetic disorders associated with visual disability. He runs a busy clinical service, as well as overseeing scientific teams providing accredited genomic testing for inherited eye disorder patients. His overarching aims are to improve the diagnosis, management and treatment of such conditions, and the Gen-o project is a core proponent of this work.
Dr Danny Bosch
associate director of business development and commercial, Discover-NOW London SDE
Danny is Associate Director of Business Development and Commercial at Imperial College Health Partners and the Commercial Lead for the new Discover-NOW London SDE. He is passionate about innovation and has a strong drive to make a meaningful impact to patients’ lives around the globe.
He has over 10 years of experience in driving transformative growth and innovation across Life Sciences and is equipped with deep scientific expertise and global business experience spanning startups to corporations. He is committed to paying forward by investing in the next generation of leaders as a Startup Mentor and Advisor for a range of accelerators, as Guest Lecturer at UCL Global Business School for Health and as an Angel Investor.
Mike Bracken
founding partner, Public Digital
Mike Bracken CBE is a global digital leader who has led wholesale transformations of large institutions in the private and public sector. He helps organisations change their way of working and solve systemic market, societal and macroeconomic challenges. He is best known for leading the global revolution in digital government, taking the UK to #1 in the UN rankings in 2016.
Mike Bracken is a founding partner at Public Digital, a digital change consultancy for institutions with a public mission. He was the founder and executive director of the UK Government Digital Service (GDS) and the UK’s first Government Chief Data Officer.
Mike has led digital operations and transformations in large-scale organisations in the UK and Europe, such as Guardian News & Media and the Co-operative Group. A civic technologist who helped establish MySociety, Mike uses the power of the open Internet to drive systemic change.
He currently advises more than 30 governments and global financial institutions on digital transformation, from Canada and Australia to Argentina, and is currently one of President Macron’s Global Tech Thinkers. He is an honorary professor at the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose at University College London. Mike is a partner at the Lisbon Council in Brussels and a Non-Executive Director at Chetwood Bank, a fully licensed UK fintech.
Ruth Bradbury
senior NHS Navigator, DigitalHealth.London
As the Senior NHS Navigator at DigitalHealth.London, Ruth manages a portfolio of programmes for innovators which aim to improve how they work with the NHS and enable digital transformation through the spread and adoption of technology. Ruth is a Speech and Language Therapist with over 25 years of experience working in the NHS delivering clinical services and managing teams. Her passion has always been to drive quality improvement of clinical services, and this has been applied to a range of patient groups and clinical settings.
Simone Brown
North Central London stroke optimisation lead
With a 25-year tenure at University College Hospital, my journey in healthcare has been marked by a deep commitment to advancing patient care in the realms of cardiac and stroke medicine. My career initiated in the high-stakes environment of Acute Cardiac Medicine, where I gained invaluable experience in thrombolysing patients during critical heart attack episodes. This foundational work not only honed my clinical skills but also laid the groundwork for my future endeavors in stroke care.
Leveraging my expertise in thrombolysis, I set up and ran the Hyper Acute Stroke Service (HASU) at UCLH in 2010. This venture was a natural progression from my cardiac care background, allowing me to apply my acute intervention skills to revolutionise stroke treatment and recovery processes.
My journey took a transformative turn in 2017 when I ventured into Stroke Research. Leading a project to collect outcomes from stroke patients, I ventured into coding, a skill that initially challenged yet ultimately expanded my capabilities in data analysis and interpretation. This experience proved instrumental in my leadership of an NHSE pilot aimed at refining the clinical stroke pathway, a project that concluded in 2022 with significant insights into process optimisation and patient care enhancement.
Today, I am spearheading a pioneering project to develop a clinical dashboard for our stroke pathway. This initiative is designed to provide a holistic view of patient journeys through the stroke care continuum, enabling us to capture post-discharge outcomes, identify care gaps, and implement targeted improvements. My objective is to harness the power of data and technology to elevate patient care standards, ensuring optimal health outcomes and quality of life for stroke patients.
In each phase of my career, my mission has remained unwavering: to merge clinical expertise with technological advancements to set new benchmarks in healthcare transforming patient care through innovation and collaboration.
Rhian Bulmer
chief of partnerships, Radar Healthcare
Conor Burke
CEO, Urgent Health UK
Conor is a former NHS leader who he began his career as an Occupational Therapist working as a clinician and then NHS senior manager in the NHS in London. Until 2018 he was CEO of Barking & Dagenham, Havering and Redbridge Clinical Commissioning Groups where he led a series of a major performance, quality and financial turnaround initiatives locally and across London.
Most recently he has worked as an independent healthcare consultant helping with NHS systems, HealthTech companies and life science organisations to transform the delivery of health and care. Alongside CEO of UHUK he is also a Non-Executive Director of Herts Urgent Care (HUC) Ltd and Chair of the Clive Henry Group Ltd.
Laura Burrowes
clinical development lead, Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust
Laura is the Clinical Development Lead for the Digital Health Transformation Service at Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust. In this role, she guides like-minded digital nurses to successfully adopt innovative ways to reach out and engage with service users. Laura qualified as a paediatric nurse in 2007, working in an acute paediatric setting before commencing her career in school nursing in 2018, and completing the PGDip in specialist Community Public Health Nursing (SCPHN) in 2020. In her previous role, Laura led on ChatHealth for the School Nursing Team in Manchester, igniting her passion for digital nursing.
Victoria Cardona
continuous improvement lead, North Tees and Hartlepool NHS FT
Victoria is an experienced NHS Operational Manager and Leader who originally trained in Occupational Therapy and has vast experience of working in a variety of clinical settings including a Military Hospital and Learning Disability Services before moving to an acute Trust to transform therapy services in A&E.
Victoria is adept at quality improvement and service development, particularly relating to patient flow and discharge pathways.
Holly Carr
chief clinical information officer, Stockport NHS FT
Holly Carr is a registered Paediatric Nurse with a passion for patient safety and quality improvement. Holly started her digital career at Sheffield Children’s Hospital before undertaking a Digital Leadership Scholarship and Fellowship with the Florence Nightingale Foundation. After completing her fellowship, Holly was appointed as Associate Chief Nursing Information Officer at NHSx, working across both the Digital Nursing and Digital Clinical Safety agenda.
Holly joined Stockport NHS Foundation Trust as Chief Clinical Information Officer for Clinicians, Nurses, Midwives and AHPs where she continues to lead digital transformation and has developed a passion for digital clinical safety and data driven quality improvement.
Prof Sergio Cavalaro
AIP lead and associate dean for research and innovation, academia-industry-partnership (AIP)
Sergio Cavalaro is a Professor of Infrastructure Systems and Associate Dean at Loughborough University. He has established and led centres of excellence and large multi-stakeholder collaborations for research and innovation on delivery, repair and maintenance of assets in the built environment. He leads the skills and talent agenda for UKCRIC (UK Collaboratorium for Research in Infrastructure and Cities), including 15 of the top higher education institutions in this area.
Sergio also leads C-DICE (Centre for Postdoctoral Talent in Infrastructure, Cities and Energy), the largest UK project developing postdoctoral talent to contribute to our net-zero aspirations. He is one of the leaders of the research project on RAAC for the NHS and currently advises different UK departments, central government and professional bodies on the challenges facing the UK in this space. Sergio champions the AIP, a multi-stakeholder initiative supporting the NHS’s transformation via agile action research and innovation projects linking digital, asset and clinical.
David Chalkley
deputy CCIO and associate director of pharmacy, Somerset NHS FT
David is an NHS Digital Leadership Academy Graduate with 10 years’ experience of working in digital transformation, specialising in clinical risk management and digital medicines. As deputy CCIO and a Clinical Safety Officer, he has helped shape the governance structure and process to centre patient safety, user engagement and standards compliance at the forefront of any digital transformation.
He has distilled the key learning points from his digital journey into several Digital Blueprints, providing practical advice and structured materials for other Trusts to adapt and adopt, scaling best practice.
Paul Charnley
digital lead, Healthy Wirral Partners
Paul is currently the Digital Lead for Healthy Wirral Partners which works across the health and care sectors in his local area. Wirral is one of the “Places” in Cheshire and Merseyside Integrated Care System. His role supports the development of a local integrated digital strategy that fits within the ICS strategy. He is also the co-Chair of the NHS England Transformation Directorate Digital Blueprinting Steering Committee.
Prior to that, Paul transitioned from CIO at Wirral Hospital to the Digital Lead role in the Cheshire and Merseyside Health and Care Partnership (now ICS) to direct a set of shared programmes. These included a Longitudinal Care Record, Population Health Management, Personal Health Records, Digital Maturity in organisations and Infrastructure and Cyber Security. These were in response to national and regional strategic objectives funded by initiatives such as the Health Service Led Investment (HSLI) which Paul helped shape as a CIO at one of the Global Digital Exemplars. During the Pandemic, Paul took on the added roles of coordinating the digital response which included the shift to remote consultation and the testing and outbreak management using a population health management system and then vaccination.
He was very pleased to be voted CIO of the year for 2021 by DigitalHealth.com and was awarded the Cyber Leaders award by NHS Digital’s Cyber Associate Network in 2022.
Hassan Chaudhury
commercial director, DATA-CAN
Hassan is an entrepreneur and advisor in global digital health and innovation. He is interim Commercial Director for the UK’s Health Data Research hub for cancer (DATA-CAN) and was, until recently, the Global Digital Health Specialist for the Department for International Trade (DIT).
He is a founder at Opto Health, Vita and Inovia.Bio, Visiting Lecturer at UCL Global Business School for Health, Editorial Board Member of The International Journal of Digital Health, Mentor for the NHS Innovation Accelerator, Edison Accelerator and also at KQ Labs at The Francis Crick Institute, Commercial Consultant for Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, Co-Chair of the HIMSS Innovation Committee for 2022 and a member of the HETT Steering Committee.
Ethan Chung
solution engineering manager, Keysight Technologies inc
Ethan Chung is a solution engineering manager with extensive experience in developing and implementing end-to-end automated testing solutions across diverse industry sectors as well as acting as a technical advisor and trusted consultant to customers, helping them understand the benefits and technical aspects of the test automation solutions.
Bernadette Clarke
managing director, Evolution NHS
Managing Director of Evolutions Public Sector business with a focus on the NHS, Bernadette runs teams of consultants nationally who deliver interim digital talent to NHS organisations. This is both via Outcome Based Solution models as well as a contingent model. She is an organiser of Her Plus Data Meet Up in Manchester, a female-only women-in-data meet-up group that works with the female data community in the North West to empower, mentor, and support women with a passion for data and more broadly technology-focused work. Bernadette is also a mentor for WIR – Women in Recruitment. She has worked in the recruitment sector since 2005. Managing the delivery of talent to a variety of organisations from one or two contractors right through to complex large-scale projects. Her experience straddles both the Private and Public Sectors, the last two years being solely NHS organisations. She is the Co-Curator for One Health Tech Manchester.
William Clarke
ST7 Renal Speciality registrar, Leeds teaching hospitals NHS Trust
Louise Clarkson
chief nursing information officer, Bolton NHS FT
Louise Clarkson is Chief Nursing Information Officer at Bolton NHS Foundation Trust. She has over 15 years’ experience working in the NHS as a nurse and in managerial and digital roles, with recent experience in patient flow management and unscheduled care. Since joining Bolton in February 2023, she has led the trust through its Altera Digital Health EPR optimisation, with a focus on improving patient flow and safety.
Neil Cockburn
clinical research fellow, University of Birmingham
Neil Cockburn is a clinical research fellow at the University of Birmingham and public health registrar in the West Midlands. His research in maternity care and learning health systems examines how data is used and created in healthcare services, from quality improvement to research.
Louis Coles
digital solutions service manager, North of England Care System Support
Louis has over 25 years’ experience in the public, private and not for profit sectors with extensive experience of leading transformational digital change. Louis has led digital transformation across health and social care enhancing discharge optimisation and transforming urgent & emergency care and is passionate about improving patients outcomes.
Jacqui Cooper
chief nursing information officer, Health Innovation Manchester
I am a registered nurse with a clinical background in neonatal nursing, previously working in Neonatal units across Cheshire and Mersey and for the Neonatal Regional Transport team. Throughout my career I have held many posts ranging from staff nurse, ward manager and matron through to the role of Chief Nursing Informatics Officer. I have been a CNIO in 4 organisations and have supported and led the process of digitising Nursing, Midwifery and Allied Health professionals in pre and post Electronic Patient Record go lives and beyond, enabling nurses to have an equal voice in the digital arena to ensure that information systems support nursing and allow more time for patient care, thereby reducing risk and improving quality and safety.
In my role as Chief Nursing Informatics Officer, I have participated and supported digital programmes for nurses locally, regionally and at national level. I have been responsible for strategic and operational nursing leadership in the development, deployment, re-engineering, optimisation and integration of clinical information systems to support nursing and patient care.
Stuart Cooper
EPR programme director, Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust
Stuart has over 30 years’ experience managing and delivering transformation programmes across the NHS. Joining the NHS in 1992 as a database specialist, he progressed through the stages of Programme Management leading the then QIPP and Digital Transformation agenda for Primary Care organisations across the Black Country.
He is currently the EPR Programme Director at Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, deploying Sunrise EPR to underpin clinical transformation across the Trust. Ensuring digital technology improves patient outcomes is a passion.
Michelle Corrigan
programme director, National Care Association
Michelle Corrigan is the Programme Director for Better Security, Better Care – the national and local programme supporting adult social care providers to improve their data and cyber security. Michelle oversees the programme, which is supported by the NHS Transformation Directorate, and managed by Digital Care Hub. Michelle has spent 15 years in and alongside the social care sector with a background rooted in operational delivery and innovation within adult and children’s social care. She has worked on national telehealth and telecare programmes as well as the roll out of GDPR in the sector.
Nicola Coventry
CNIO, York and Scarborough Teaching Hospitals NHS FT
Nicola is the chief nursing information officer at York and Scarborough Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. She has worked closely with the digital, nursing and therapy teams transforming documentation using structured data flows and following the workflow. Digital interests include user-centred design, workflow improvements, patient held records and reducing the documentation burden on staff.
Shaun Crinion
innovation manager, Health Innovation Kent Surrey Sussex
Shaun Crinion leads the NHS England London strategy for Integrated Urgent Care Digital. A Paramedic by profession with a professional interest and speciality in Digital Healthcare. Shaun has a strong interest in unlocking the learning ability of AI to provide more efficient and safer patient journeys.
Kyle Cromey
chief pharmacy information officer, Bolton NHS FT
Kyle Cromey is Chief Pharmacy Information Officer at Bolton NHS Foundation Trust. With a wealth of experience in digital pharmacy, following roles at Well Pharmacy and Co-op Health, Kyle joined the trust in 2020 to support the introduction of the trusts ePMA system. His team recently integrated the trusts Altera Digital Health Sunrise EPR with its pharmacy interface, greatly improving Bolton’s electronic medication management capabilities and improving patient safety.
Prof Michael Crooks
senior clinical lecturer and consultant in respiratory medicine, University of Hull and Hull University Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust
Prof Michael Crooks is a respiratory physician and academic working at Hull York Medical School, University of Hull and Hull University Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. He is Clinical Lead for the Humber and North Yorkshire Respiratory Network and chairs the Hull and East Yorkshire Respiratory Education Group.
He leads the Hull and East Yorkshire Integrated COPD Service and the Hull University Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust Respiratory Virtual Ward and is a member of the local asthma service. He undertakes applied health research relating to the diagnosis and management of airways diseases, such as asthma and COPD, and their exacerbations.
Katie Cutts
digital matron, Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital
Hello, I’m Katie Cutts, a dedicated Digital Matron at the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital. With a foundation in theatres as an Operating Department Practitioner, I bring a wealth of experience to my role. Currently studying for my postgraduate diploma in digital leadership, being mentored as part of the CCIO programme has played a pivotal role in my journey, aiding me in achieving milestones. Passionate about clinical safety, I strive to equip individuals with the necessary skills and access to digital solutions.
Neil Darvill
joint chief digital information officer, North Bristol NHS Trust and University Hospitals Bristol and Weston NHS FT
Neil has more than 25 years’ of experience leading NHS Trust Informatics and IT Divisions. At NBT, Neil and his team have driven the digital transformation of patient care since 2017. Their vision – to deliver ‘a digital trust, providing a single view of information for clinicians with collaboration at the core’ and ‘exceptional care, quality and safety for patients’ – has involved the successful overhaul of NBT’s IT network, software, hardware and care systems. This ongoing strategy is built on the principle of change enabled by IT and led by clinicians.
Since beginning his joint role in June 2023 (the first joint Board-level appointment for NBT and UHBW), Neil has been guiding Bristol’s two acute Trusts towards a single digital care vision and strategy. This will hugely improve future ways of clinical working across both Trusts, and ultimately the local care system, with improved patient outcomes at its core.
Dr Rishi Das-Gupta
chief executive, Health Innovation Network
Prior to this role he has held executive roles at NHS trusts as CITO, Director of Innovation and as Director of Operations and worked as a medical doctor. Rishi also has experience working as a strategy consultant at Oliver Wyman and McKinsey and Company. In addition to his primary medical qualification (M.B.,B.S.). Rishi holds an M.A. in law (University of Cambridge) and an M.B.A. (London Business School).
Prof Jim Davies
CTO, National Institute for Health Research Health Informatics Collaborative and professor of software engineering, University of Oxford
Jim Davies is Professor of Software Engineering at the University of Oxford. He is technical lead for the Thames Valley and Surrey NHS Secure Data Environment, and leads a group within the Oxford Big Data Institute focussed upon data quality and interoperability. He has been CTO for a range of organisations and initiatives working with NHS data at scale, including: Genomics England, the NIHR Health Informatics Collaborative, and the National Consortium of Intelligent Medical Imaging.
Jacqueline Davis
CNIO, System C Healthcare
Jacqueline has been a nurse for 38 years, primarily working in the NHS but also spending some time overseas. She has held a variety of nursing roles including education, advanced practice, and operational roles. Her last two NHS roles were as head of nursing for surgery and surgical specialties, then head of nursing for practice and professional development.
After investigating a serious incident, Jacqueline recognised the future potential of digital technology in healthcare and has dedicated the last nine years to working in this space. She supports NHS organisations in implementing and optimising clinical digital technology to improve clinician’s lives and patient outcomes, particularly focusing on the evolving professional specialty of clinical digital leadership.
Jacqueline collaborated with the Florence Nightingale Foundation to develop the Aspiring Digital Leadership Programme, aimed at empowering individuals entering leadership roles in the NHS through the digital agenda.
Kimberly Dawson
senior digital clinical safety officer, Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS FT
Kimberley is a Registered Adult Nurse with a background of clinical work within Cardio-Thoracic Critical Care, Transplantation and the wards. She is now the Senior CSO for Bedfordshire Foundation Trust Hospitals. She is also the Regional Chair for the EoE Digital Shared Decision Making Council.
Sally Deacon
digital transformation and OHC lead, Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent ICS
Sally Leads the Digital Transformation Team within Staffordshire, Stoke-on-Trent ICB and has a background in quality improvement, change management and strategy. She has worked in healthcare in the NHS, Bupa and Australia. Sally is motivated by improving the patient experience of care and supporting through “digital” active engagement in their care journey.
Pav Deagon
lead pharmacist – pharmacy informatics and digital medicines, North East London NHS FT
Pav Deagon is Lead Pharmacist for Pharmacy Informatics & Digital Medicines at NELFT. She has an extensive background working as a clinical pharmacist for the NHS. From being lead EPMA pharmacist, her role has expanded to delivering a wider digital medicines programme across her organisation.. Pav is passionate about achieving positive outcomes for patients through clinical informatics, transformation, and innovation.
Melynda Decker
director of clinical solutions, Elsevier
Melynda Decker is the Director of Clinical Solutions at Elsevier. She has 15 years of experience within the healthcare sphere supporting customers across the globe to achieve their clinical workflow goals and ambitions.
Melynda’s expertise enables her to have a wider perspective on the needs of the healthcare industry, the challenges it faces and the solutions available to support it. Her in-depth knowledge of clinical technology means Melynda is at the forefront of digital clinical enhancements, with a wide range of expertise across several digital clinical decision-making solutions.
Prof Erika Denton
interim national medical director for transformation, NHS England
Erika is a consultant radiologist and was Medical Director in Norwich from 2018 to 2023. She was appointed to join the team of National Medical Directors in September 2023 with an extensive portfolio in the Transformation Directorate including clinical leadership of digital programmes, artificial intelligence, research and pathway transformation.
Erika’s appointment to the role of Medical Director in 2018 followed 2 years as Associate Medical Director.
As National Advisor on Imaging to NHS Improvement & NHS England Erika provided advice from 2016 – 2020. She convened and chaired the National Imaging Optimisation and Productivity Delivery Board. She lead work to improve imaging services across England and continues to work with NHS Digital on implementation of artificial intelligence in imaging.
Arjun Dhillon
deputy CCIO, NHS England
Arjun is a General Practitioner and lives and works in Ealing, London. After graduating from University College London in 2003, he undertook medical training and gained MRCP in 2007. He then retrained as a GP, gaining MRCGP in 2009. He has postgraduate diplomas in Medical Education and Healthcare Informatics.
In 2009, Arjun became a Managing Partner at the Argyle Health Group, where he leads a team caring for 21,000 patients. The practice has won multiple awards including BMJ Primary Care Team of the Year in 2015 and Clinical Team of the Year in 2016. His clinical interest lies in Care Homes Medicine.
Arjun has worked in local commissioning, being Clinical Lead for Prescribing, Ophthalmology, Infectious Diseases, IT & Diagnostics, and a member of the Ealing CCG Governing Board until 2017.
Dr Bishoy Dimitri
director of clinical informatics (CCIO), Oxford University Hospitals NHS FT
Bishoy is the Chief Clinical Information Officer (Director for Clinical Informatics) for Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. He is also the Vice-Chair for the CCIO Advisory Panel to provide a support and direction for the CCIO community nationally. He also has digital health start-up experience as the Chief Medical Officer of Lister, a task management application aiming to eliminate paper job lists for both Doctors and Nurses.
Bishoy is keen to utilise his skills in operational management, innovation and leadership to provide impactful change in the NHS to support staff to deliver better care for patients.
Dr Vin Diwakar
interim national director of transformation, National Transformation Directorate, NHS England
Dr Vin Diwakar is the Interim National Director of Transformation, leading the NHS’s work nationally in transforming the way that care is delivered, enabling the access to best care and outcomes for people that the NHS serves and the people who work in it.
Prior to this role Vin was the Medical Director for Transformation in NHS England, providing clinical leadership to improvement and transformation. Additionally while in this role, Vin led teams supporting improvement and transformation of a number of different clinical areas including diagnostics, urgent, emergency, acute and planned care, and was responsible for improving clinical effectiveness.
Formerly Vin provided clinical leadership to London’s health and care system, and was a key member of the multi-professional regional team which led the capital through the COVID-19 pandemic.
Vin has been in the NHS for 33 years, working as a consultant paediatrician in Birmingham.
Janet Dodd
matron for digital technology, Sheffield Children’s Hospital NHS FT
She has always had an interest in patient information and data and although she is not an expert in technology, she embraces digital change and the benefits it brings.
Tara Donnelly
founder, Digital Care
Tara Donnelly runs Digital Care, a boutique advisory firm that supports clients in the NHS and digital health innovators scale digital care, with a particular emphasis on digital home care.
Tara has worked in the NHS for 30 years with a career that has spanned a range of operational roles in hospitals across London including Director of Operations at the Whittington, Managing Director roles at University College London Hospitals and Chief Executive of the West Middlesex University Hospital. Her second Chief Executive position was leading the Health Innovation Network, the academic health science network for south London. Most recently she was the Chief Digital Officer for NHS England.
She is President of the Health CEOs’ Club, and a Trustee and Senior Independent Director of leading think tank, the Nuffield Trust. Her prior Trustee experience includes ten years on the Board of Macmillan Cancer Support.
Prof Jane Eddleston
group joint medical director, Manchester NHS FT
Professor Jane Eddleston graduated from the university of Dundee Medical School in 1981, moved to the Northwest in 1983, and continued her training in Anaesthesia and Intensive Care; first in the Mersey Region and from 1987 in Greater Manchester. She was appointed Consultant in Anaesthesia and Intensive Care in 1991. She was appointed Joint Group Executive Medical Director in 2018, having previously been Deputy Group Medical Director. In addition, she has fulfilled several National roles during her career including Department of Health clinical advisor for Acute Care 2005-2011 and latterly Chair of NHS England’s Clinical Reference Group for Adult Critical Care from 2013 to 2022. She was awarded the Gold medal in 2021 from the Faculty of Intensive Care Medicine for National and International services to Intensive Care Medicine.
Ellen Edwards
digital transformation research and engagement lead, Health Education and Improvement Wales
Ellen qualified as a registered adult nurse in 2006. After working clinically in acute medicine, intensive care, paediatric emergency care and prehospital telephone triage, Ellen moved into education and digital health. In 2021 Ellen commenced a Florence Nightingale Foundation Digital Leadership Scholarship and in 2023 became a Federation of Informatics professionals future digital leader bursary holder. Ellen has experience of leading Digital Transformational change and currently leads on the NHS Wales Digital Capability Framework for Healthcare.
Helen Elliot-Mainwaring
PhD fellow, THIS Insititute
Helen has worked in healthcare for over 35 years in a variety of professional roles from care assistant and ward clerk to internal auditor. She is a former adult nurse who specialised in palliative care, and has been a registered midwife for the past 24 years. She has two MScs in healthcare quality improvement and is a Prince 2 Practitioner, complimented with Lean Six Sigma Green Belt methodology.
She is currently finalising her PhD thesis researching maternity staff experiences of asking for help as escalation tools have transitioned to digital ways of working. To date she is the only midwife to have been sponsored by the The healthcare Improvement Studies Institute.
Emma-Jane Eyers
research fellow, Bradford Institute for Health, Research NIHR Applied Research Collaboration Yorkshire and Humber and University of Bradford
Emma-Jane is a researcher at the University of Bradford, a member of the Health Technologies for Quality and Safety Group and The Wolfson Centre for Applied Health Research. In her early career, she was ‘just a carer’ and proud of it! More recently, her drive and ambition sees her exploring the role of the Digital Midwife as transformational leaders driving forward the digital agenda for UK maternity services.
Hilary Fanning
managing director of research and innovation, University Hospitals Birmingham NHS FT
Keith Farrar
process mining community lead, AnalystX; and chief impact officer and co-founder, Logan Tod & Co
Keith is a Consultant Clinical Informatician and Senior Responsible Owner for the Shared Medicines Record in Wales. He was lead author of the strategy document, ‘The Future of Electronic Prescribing in Wales’, that led to the formation of the Welsh Digital Medicines Transformation Portfolio.
As Chief Pharmacist at Wirral Hospital, Keith was responsible for the implementation and development of one of the first electronic prescribing and medicines administration (ePMA) systems deployed in the NHS (1991). In 2005 he moved into the commercial sector to work on the National Programme for IT, before re-joining the NHS in October 2014.
At NHS England, he was the Senior Responsible Owner for the Electronic Prescriptions Service, and other programmes, leaving NHSX in 2020. He returned to practice as Chief Pharmacist at the Clatterbridge Cancer Centre in 2021 and joined NHS Wales in 2022.
He has published research papers on pharmacy practice and information technology and has been an advisor to several national and international pharmacy organisations. He is a Founding Fellow of the Faculty of Clinical Informatics
Samantha Fay
CEO, SiSU Health
Mike Fell
director of national cyber operations, NHS England
Mike has spent 15 years in range of security roles for the UK Government, and is currently Executive Director of National Cyber Operations for NHS Digital, with accountability for the security of NHS Digital’s data and systems, as well as supporting the resilience of the wider Health System in defending and respond to cyber attacks.
Prior to this, Mike spent six years as the Head of Cyber Security Operations and Deputy Chief Security Officer for HMRC. Previous roles have included leading HMRC’s anti-phishing efforts, work with the Foreign & Commonwealth Office in Afghanistan, helping to secure the 2012 Olympic & Paralympics and voluntary work to help others protect themselves from cyber threats.
Lorraine Foley
chief executive officer, PRSB
Lorraine joined the PRSB in November 2015. After the first half of her career in corporate banking, Lorraine moved into the NHS 18 years ago, initially as one of the executive team responsible for creating the new health regulator, the Healthcare Commission. There Lorraine was responsible for defining and implementing the information strategy to transform the approach to regulation through the intelligent use of information.
Since then, she has built wide experience of different parts of the NHS, including roles as director of national support at the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement, commercial director in an NHS Mental Health and Community Trust, director of commissioning at Oxfordshire CCG and head of strategy at NHS England (south).
James Freed
deputy director, NHS Digital Academy, NHS England
In 2017 James was voted by peers as one of the top 100 influencers globally in Health IT as part of the #HIT100 twitter campaign. He is a Fellow of the British Computer Society, a FedIP accredited Leading Practitioner and a Chartered Health CIO accredited through CHIME.
Amy Freeman
CDIO, University Hospitals of North Midlands NHS Trust
Amy Freeman is the Chief Digital Information Officer at University Hospitals of North Midlands. Amy has worked in the field of information technology (IT) support and digital since 1998, she joined the NHS in 2002. She has held senior IT and digital leadership roles at NHS Connecting for Health (now NHS Digital), NHS Commissioning Board (now NHS England), Staffordshire and Stoke on Trent Partnership NHS Trust (now Midlands Partnership NHS Foundation Trust) and Mid Cheshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.
. Amy moved to work for NHS provider organisations to be closer to frontline care (Community and Acute) to help make a difference to the safety and quality of care provided to patients. This has included the delivery of a range of clinical systems most notably electronic patient record systems, patient portals and a virtual clinic solutions. Amy’s ambition is for “geeks to save lives”. Using technology to support the clinical decisions clinicians make with their patients about their care and treatment. Reducing the risk of error.
More recently Amy has been interested in how digital can help (or in some cases hinder) the equality and diversity agenda. Using data to drive a better understanding of our citizens. Amy is the co-chair of the Midlands Skills Development Network, which has a remit is to provide the infrastructure for improving leadership and professional development skills, raising standards, and sharing best practice through economy-wide learning.
Umesh Gadhvi
chief digital and information officer, North East London NHS FT
Umesh Gadhvi has more than 14 years’ experience in the health technology sector, currently working as Chief Digital and Information Officer at North East London NHS Foundation Trust. Amongst many digital priorities, he is leading the development of the trust’s virtual wards offering, which takes an integrated approach that brings the many stakeholders across health and social care together.
Sherif Gonem
consultant respiratory physician, Nottingham University Hospitals NHS FT
Sherif Gonem is a respiratory physician in Nottingham with a research interest in applications of AI and big data in medicine. He is currently investigating the use of AI-based scoring systems and wearable technology for detecting patient deterioration in hospital. He is the recipient of an MRC Clinical Academic Research Partnership award and has recently received a grant from the NHS Transformation Directorate to introduce wearable respiratory rate monitors at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust.
Will Goodwin
assistant director of programmes – digital maturity and capabilities, NHS England
Will Goodwin is the Assistant Director of Digital Maturity and Capabilities within NHS England’s Transformation Directorate’s multi-billion pound Frontline Digitisation programme. He is an experienced digital leader with over a decade in the technology industry and led the What Good Frame work which defined the digital ‘north star’ for ICS and NHS Trusts. He is currently delivering the digital maturity assessment of the NHS in England which will support local systems to level up.
Will has a proven track record of delivering large-scale digital transformation initiatives and has led multi-disciplinary teams in the development and implementation of complex technology programs. He has extensive experience in managing the complete lifecycle of digital projects, from strategy and planning to execution and delivery.
Throughout his career, Will has demonstrated his ability to drive innovation and improve operational efficiency, resulting in significant cost savings. He has a deep understanding of digital technology and is passionate about using it as a transformational enabler to improve health and care outcomes.
Hayley Grafton
CNIO, University of Hospitals Leicester NHS Trust
Rose Marie Granaghan
digital clinical practice educator, Imperial College NHS Trust
Rose works as a Digital Clinical Practice Educator at Imperial College Healthcare NHS trust. She is an adult nurse with a background in trauma and neurosurgery and has been working with the team since mid 2022.
Dawn Greaves
associate director of digital transformation, Leeds Community Healthcare NHS Trust
Having worked in the health care sector for over 30 years, has gained a wealth of experience in digital transformation, with significant experience in acute sector transformation, as well as more recent experience across a whole ICB region including primary and social care. Implementing digital solutions to transform regional working. Dawn has recently commenced a role in a Community NHS Trust provider and is looking forward to utilised her skills in this area.
Skilled in Stakeholder management, Benefits Realisation, Programme Delivery, Procurement, Supplier Negotiations and Healthcare Management. Exceptional leadership skills, including mentoring future leaders to thrive. Educated with a Masters in Health informatics from the University of Leeds, along with MSP and PRINCE2 Practitioner. BCS Professional member. Featured in Computing Magazine’s IT Leaders Top 100 and Top 50 Tech Women Celebration lists in 2023.
Diane Green
community nurse, Cheshire and Merseyside ICS
Most of her career has been dedicated to Respiratory Medicine including the setup of the Ashton Wigan & Leigh Community COPD service 2005/6, contract negotiation and service development for Knowsley Community COPD Service in 2007 and Lastly St Helens Community COPD service in 2011 including the development of the Warm Home for Lungs project.
Keith Grimes
digital health and innovation consultant and founder, Curistica
Dr. Keith Grimes is a GP and a Digital Health and Innovation Consultant. He is the Founder of Curistica, a radical clinical innovation consultancy which helps visionary leaders develop ideas that change the world.
Dr. Keith has a global people-centred approach, focusing on using technology to remove geographical, social and economic barriers to accessing care. With a medical and commercial mindset, his experience of over 25 years as a doctor coupled with his leadership roles at the forefront of the UK’s health tech industry give him a unique perspective. He is passionate about the power of technology-driven healthcare solutions, with a particular focus on digital health, AI, wearables and the Metaverse.
Jules Gudgeon
national digital midwife lead for maternity, NHS England
With over 30 years of midwifery experience, Jules Gudgeon is a key player in advancing digital technology in maternity care, post the 2015 National Maternity Review by Baroness Cumberlege.
Leading roles in the NHS Digital Maternity Programme and the creation of the award-winning Digital Midwives Expert Reference Group, now the Digital Maternity Leaders community, showcases her commitment to collaborative efforts in the digital maternity landscape. As the National Chief Midwifery Information Officer at NHS England, she was a 2023 HSJ Clinical Leader of the Year Award finalist.
In 2024, Jules persists in advocating for digital leadership and addressing the maternity digital divide with #FixTheDigitalDivide #DigitalMaternity.
Guy Lucchi
managing director of healthcare, System C
Speaker Session
- - Keynote: A systems view on money, digital, the NHS and UK economy - November 27, 2023
Guy leads System C’s healthcare division and is passionate about the power of digital enabled change to improve patient outcomes and workforce experience.
Previously joint Digital Innovation Director for Health Innovation Manchester and Chief Digital Officer for the Greater Manchester Health and Social Care Partnership, he has an impressive background as a digital leader, with a proven track record for shaping and delivering some of the largest and most complex digital enabled transformation programmes in healthcare.
Dr Nadine Hachach-Haram
founder and CEO, Proximie
Proximie founder and CEO Nadine Hachach-Haram is a practicing NHS Surgeon, lecturer and award-winning clinical entrepreneur. In developing Proximie, Nadine drew on her passions for innovation, education and, most significantly, improving access to safe surgical care worldwide to create a solution that CNN has dubbed the “Future of Surgery”.
Jacob Haddad
co-founder and CEO, Accurx
Jacob is Co-founder and CEO of Accurx, a communication platform used in 68% of NHS Trusts and by 98% of GP practices. Accurx is on a mission to join up communication across healthcare, to make patients healthier, staff happier, and the system more efficient.
Graeme Hall
chief pharmacy information officer, University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust
In 2016 I started in the role of Chief Pharmacy Information Officer, the first such post in the UK. Focus has been delivering interoperability between systems managing medicines workflows, such as the ePMA and stock control systems and also utilising bar codes and the emerging field of pharmaco-mechatronics to seamlessly close the loop in hospital pharmacy operations
Renee Hall
associate nursing informatics officer, Mid and South Essex NHS FT
My career began with care of the elderly and learning disabilities within the community before leading onto becoming a Registered Midwife 14 years ago. My career took an unanticipated turn when my passion of how patient care and clinical practice could be enhanced using technology when leading on the implementation of a Maternity EPR System. It was during this period that I was able to expand my vision beyond maternity and see the benefits of clinically motivated, technology enhanced care, thus leading to my current position 4 years ago as an Associate Nursing Informatics Officer.
I am committed to staying at the forefront of healthcare technical development and innovation and am currently engaged within a Florence Nightingale Digital Leadership Scholarship Programme along with aiming to commence a MSc in Senior Leadership in 2024.
My international membership with the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) attests to my global perspective and commitment to advancing healthcare through technology. I am passionate about leveraging technology to elevate patient care standards and contribute to the strategic design of clinical processes. My expertise, dedication and commitment are an asset to the healthcare and tech community as it continues with the Digital Revolution.
Sarah Hanbridge
CCIO nursing and AHP, Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS FT
Sarah is a Registered Adult Nurse & Practice Lecturer/Practitioner predominantly working within Acute trust with 28 years of clinical and leadership experience. Her current role is a Chief Clinical Information Officer (CCIO) Nursing & AHP Leeds teaching hospital Sarah was previously a Regional CNIO Northwest. Sarah attained one of the first Florence Nightingale Digital Scholarships in 2020, during the pandemic Sarah set up the Northwest Regional CNIO/Mid-wife and AHP network. Sarah is the CNIO Chair of the Digital Health Network Sarah’s and CHIME UK & INTERPenAPI Board member her passion is digital transformation to improve patient care.
Abigail Harrison
executive director of digital and infrastructure, Lancashire & South Cumbria NHS Foundation Trust
I am the Chief Digital and Infrastructure Officer at Lancashire & South Cumbria NHS Foundation Trust. Prior to this, I held the role of Deputy Director for Quality, Innovation and Improvement and CIO for the North West Ambulance Service. I am passionate about transforming health and care for all people by harnessing technology, data and estates, using a methodologically driven approach to improve the way we deliver services. I am a big advocate for clinical leadership and co-design with patients, providing the space for staff, patients and technical teams to work together to generate and test ideas.
I have a unique understanding and combined experience of digital, estates, mental health, improvement and NHS regulatory requirements over my 20 years in the NHS. I have worked nationally, regionally and for providers. I have worked alongside some of the world’s leading healthcare improvers and thought leaders and developed partnerships with industry, academia and health and social care to deliver change. I am passionate about leading teams to deliver standards and governance ensuring safety and security whilst enabling change and doing this thorough collaboration and partnerships where we bring people together to deliver on shared goals.
At LSCFT I have Executive responsibility for Digital and Estates. For 4 years prior I was the CIO at NWAS where we were able to significantly improve our digital maturity, taking us from negative outliers to leaders in the ambulance sector rapidly improving our infrastructure and enabling digital innovation underpinned by improvement methods.
Before NWAS I spent 10 years working in improvement and innovation in Salford. During this time I worked regionally and nationally to deliver national measurement systems, large scale change programmes and provide support to teams testing innovative solutions to some of the biggest challenges across the NHS.
Sir Julian Hartley
CEO, NHS Providers
Julian joined NHS Providers as chief executive in February 2023, having been chief executive of Leeds Teaching Hospitals since 2013. NHS Providers is the membership organisation for the NHS hospital, mental health, community and ambulance services that treat patients and service users in the NHS.
We help those NHS foundation trusts and trusts to deliver high-quality, patient-focused care by enabling them to learn from each other, acting as their public voice and helping shape the system in which they operate. NHS Providers has all trusts in England in voluntary membership, collectively accounting for £115bn of annual expenditure and employing 1.4 million people.
During his decade of service at Leeds, Julian led a major programme of culture change and staff engagement to deliver improved quality, operational and financial performance.
Julian was awarded Knight Bachelor for services to healthcare in the 2022 Queen’s Birthday Honours.
Stacey Hatton
CNIO, University Hospitals of Derby and Burton FT
Stacey [RGN, BSc, MSc] is the CNIO at the University Hospitals of Derby and Burton NHS Foundation Trust. She has held various digital transformation roles in three large NHS acute trusts since 2017. Before taking up positions in digital transformation, she worked clinically in the Emergency Department, medical wards, and the Patient Safety and Quality Improvement team.
Stacey is a Florence Nightingale Foundation 2022 Digital Scholar and whilst she has been involved in and led several digital transformation projects, she is interested in how to create a digitally positive culture in the NHS and plans to explore this during her FNF year.
In addition to her NHS experience, Stacey also co-founded a health IT company, a clinically-led enterprise developing forward-thinking quality assurance and improvement software. The start-up is on a mission to help clinical colleagues use data to improve patient care.
Jane Hayward
pathology and imaging lead, Wessex Imaging Network and Southern Counties Pathology Network
Jane Hayward is the Director of the Wessex Pathology and Imaging Networks. She has 35 years’ experience in the NHS and was been a University Hospital Board Director for 15 years. A keen enthusiast for digital transformation and am leading several digital programmes across Hampshire, Dorset and the Isle of Wight. This includes solutions for image sharing and reporting across Trusts and different PACs/RIS systems, a single instance of LIMs across 7 Trusts and the implementation of digital pathology solutions.
Alex Hernandez
digital health policy advisor, One HealthTech Manchester
Alex is a healthcare policy consultant with over 10 years of experience in service design and deployment and adoption of digital health innovations, evidence-based policymaking, and strategic partnership building. Her mission is to leverage the potential of digital technologies to foster collaborative cultures, optimise patient outcomes, and drive healthcare transformation.
Recently, Alex served as the Outreach and Engagement Director at NGH Automation Accelerator, a leading organisation that supports the development and scaling of robotic process automation across the NHS. In this role, she facilitated effective partnerships for digital health. Alex has also worked on supporting digital innovations finding a complaint route to market as a Health Tech Policy Advisor in the Digital & IT Category Team at NHS Shared Business Services, where her focus was to engage with suppliers and NHS organisations. Since 2020, she co-leads the One Health Tech Manchester Hub advocating for diversity and inclusion in health tech.
Dr Jennifer Hill
accelerated access collaborative programme lead, NHS England
Jo Hillier
chief clinical information officer, Sussex Partnership Trust
Jo Hillier is the Chief Clinical Information Officer (CCIO) for Sussex Partnership. Sussex Partnership is a large mental health and learning disabilities Trust in the South-East of England. Jo is an Occupational Therapist and Psychological Therapist with twenty-five years of clinical experience in physical and mental health in the UK and New Zealand.
Jo is committed to ensuring that the benefits and opportunities of digital technologies are a reality within the delivery of mental health and are leveraged to have an important role in improving the mental health of the population and the delivery of health and care services.
Jo is passionate about inclusive digital leadership and actively encourages clinicians and operational colleagues from all disciplines to be a part of digital transformation. Jo is a graduate of cohort four of the NHS Digital Academy.
Steven Hipwell
digital lead, New Hospitals Programme, NHS Lancashire and South Cumbria ICB
Steven is a keen advocate of what technology can do to help improve peoples’ lives and how it can be practically applied to do that. As digital lead for Lancashire and South Cumbria’s two new hospitals he works with a talented and passionate team of NHS, commercial, public-sector, and academic colleagues to co-design their future hospitals.
Jon Hoeksma
CEO, Digital Health
Jon is the founder and CEO of Digital Health, the health IT B2B news, research and events publisher and professional networks specialist. He previously co-founded and edited eHealth Insider, and is a leading journalist, commentator and thought leader on UK health IT. In 2014 he led the trade sale of eHealth insider to Informa Plc.
Achievements of note include: founding the UK CCIO movement, from launch of CCIO campaign in 2011 to development and growth of CCIO Networks and community; the development of Digital Health Networks – centred on CCIO and CIO Networks – as the leading independent online best practice community of NHS IT professionals – 5,000+ members as of November 2020; plus growing Digital Health Summer Schools into the premier health IT leadership event in UK; and launching Digital Health Rewired in March 2019 as the most dynamic and compelling Expo in digital health space.
Ruth Holland
deputy CIO, Imperial College Healthcare NHS FT & Director of Regions, AphA
Ruth joined Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust as Deputy CIO in 2011, having been a Board-level ICT Director south of the Thames. She is passionate about digital professionals being part of the multidisciplinary healthcare team and maximising the value of data to help deliver quality patient care and research. Ruth has been the Association of Professional Healthcare Analysts (AphA) London branch lead since December 2020 and invests time in developing the next generation of analytics leaders.
Tracey Holland
CNIO, associate director of quality standards, Norfolk and Suffolk NHS FT
My current role is Associate Director of Quality Standards and Chief Nursing Information Officer, working for Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust.
Rachel Hope
director, Digital Prevention Services, NHS England
Digital Health Check. Until very recently, Rachel had been leading the teams responsible for the NHS App and NHS website, as well as enabling and underpinning capabilities such as NHS login. The NHS App has now recorded more than 34 million sign-ups and the NHS website is the largest source of health information in Europe, with an average of 100 million visits a month. Together these services support people to stay well, get well, and manage their health and care.
Throughout Rachel’s career, she has worked across a range a digital and policy roles in the public sector, including at the Cabinet Office, HM Treasury, Department for Education, and HMRC. She champions truly multidisciplinary teams, which bring digital, policy and clinical expertise into single teams.
Tim Horton
assistant director for innovation and improvement (insights and analysis), The Health Foundation
Tim Horton joined the Health Foundation in December 2015 as an Associate Director. His role is focussed on identifying and communicating the insights and learning from the Health Foundation’s programmes, as well as supporting the spread of health care innovation and improvement.
From 2011 to 2015, Tim was health policy adviser to the Leader of the Opposition, the Rt Hon Ed Miliband MP, and Head of Public Services at the Labour Party. He also convened the independent Taskforce on Mental Health in Society, whose report The Mentally Healthy Society was published in January 2015.
Prior to this, Tim was Research Director at the Fabian Society, where he published research in several areas of social and economic policy. In 2005 he was a special adviser at the Department of Trade & Industry and prior to that a policy adviser on science and innovation policy at HM Treasury.
Dr Paul Hudson
operational medical director, Dudley Group NHS FT
Dr Paul Hudson is a Consultant Anaesthetist with a long history of clinical leadership experience and is currently Operational Medical Director at Dudley group NHSFT. His portfolio includes clinical lead for the virtual wards at Dudley having previously been co-clinical lead for the NHSE Midlands virtual ward programme.
Phil Huggins
national CISO for health and social care, NHS England
Phil is a proven security leader currently employed as a Senior Civil Servant with over 24 years of experience in security and technology roles. Phil has designed and operated security for critical national infrastructure and sensitive government. Phil has advised and managed global financial services organisations and advised national regulators on cyber resilience and cybersecurity.
As National CISO for Health and Social Care Phil sets system strategy and architecture for the Health & Social Care system including the NHS, as well as DHSC and it’s ALBs and more than 20,000 social care providers. He also acts as the NIS regulator for operators of essential services in Health & Social Care.
Helen Thomas
CEO, Digital Health & Care Wales
Speaker Session
- - Keynote: A systems view on money, digital, the NHS and UK economy - November 27, 2023
Helen has been the CEO of Digital Health & Care Wales since 2021, leading the organisation’s impressive response to the Covid-19 pandemic, supporting the NHS in Wales to adopt data and digital advances at pace and scale.
Helen also led the organisation through its transition to a Special Health Authority on 1st April 2021, with Digital Health & Care Wales continuing to deliver national digital and data services to NHS Wales.
Helen was named Digital NHS CEO of the year in 2021, and has an MSc in Health Informatics from Swansea University, is a leading practitioner of the Federation of Informatics Professionals, a fellow of the British Computer Society and a Professor of Practice at University of Wales Trinity St David.
Ben Jeeves
associate chief clinical information officer and clinical safety officer, Midlands Partnership University NHS FT
I am currently an Associate Chief Clinical Information Officer (ACCIO), Combined with CSO duties, and additionally hold the roles of; Allied Health Professional (AHP) professional Lead, and remain clinically active as an Advanced Practice Physiotherapist in an integrated MSK service at Midlands Partnership University NHS Foundation trust.
Daniel Johnston MRes, RN
senior clinical workflow specialist & UK NHS clinical safety officer, Imprivata
Daniel has assumed a range of leadership roles in emergency care provision in both clinical and R&D positions in NHS, Harvard University Hospitals and Health IT industry.
Throughout maintaining his clinical practice, Daniel has occupied management and operational roles directing frontline services to meet the contemporary challenges in healthcare provision. He is also a recipient of a NIHR Clinical Research Fellowship award at King’s College London, researching Emergency Department Overcrowding, Human Factors and Organisation Resilience.
Daniel continues to be active within the nursing community championing the development of Nursing Chief Information Officer role at a national and European level: with involvement in GDE Nursing & Midwifery Learning Community and HIMSS Europe Nursing Informatics Community.
Dr Andrew Jones
head of clinical innovation, Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Andrew is Head of Clinical Innovation at Amazon Web Services and also the Director of Innovation at the UCL Centre for Digital Innovation powered by AWS. He is a physician by background with 20 years’ experience of working in the NHS. Over the past 15 years he has worked in a variety of Health Technology roles including on the UK National Programme for IT, BMJ, Hearst Health and DXC Technology. He helps healthcare organisations progress at all stages of their digital transformation journey. In his current role, he supports customers and partners to build healthcare solutions using AWS’ cloud services to improve patient experience and clinical outcomes.
Dr Paul Jones
CDIO, Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS FT
Paul is the Chief Digital Information Officer at Leeds Teaching Hospitals, where he leads a team of 450 digital and information staff. He has held senior, digital roles in the public and private sector over the last twenty-years including CTO for the NHS in England and Group CIO at Serco.
Prof Rowan Pritchard Jones
executive medical director, Cheshire and Merseyside ICS
Professor Rowan Pritchard Jones is Executive Medical Director to the C&M ICS and is committed to system wide improvements for patients and is determined to break down the silos of working that have been a barrier to truly joined up healthcare across social, primary, secondary and tertiary care.
Rowan is also a Consultant Plastic Reconstructive Surgeon and an Honorary Clinical Professor at both University of Liverpool and Edge Hill University, with an academic interest in skin cancer and chemo resistance as well as population health.
Dr Louise Jopling
commercial director, Health Innovation East
Louise holds a PhD in immunology from Imperial College London and drawing on both her background in science and years of experience in drug discovery, development and commercialisation within academia, biotech and pharmaceutical organisations, she leads the commercial team to develop partnerships and support innovators refine their business models, value propositions and navigate the NHS to maximise population benefit and generate economic growth at a regional and national level.
Louise joined Health Innovation East from Johnson and Johnson Innovation, where she led partnership activities across Europe, Middle East and Africa to identify and incubate external assets and capabilities to advance the portfolio of the Immunology Therapy Area for Janssen.
Louise is Royal Society Entrepreneur in Residence at the Babraham Institute, a board member of the Medtech Accelerator, Strategic Advisor to Enhanc3D Genomics and a mentor on a number of accelerator programmes including Start Codon. She is also a long-standing member of the British Society for Immunology and on the Editorial Board for Immunotherapy Advances journal.
Ramandeep Kaur
chief clinical information officer, University Hospitals of Northamptonshire NHS Group
I am an enthusiastic individual, who is passionate about digital innovation and transformation, clinical informatics and raising the profile of Pharmacy and AHPs in the digital world. I am currently the Chief Clinical Information Officer at University Hospitals of Northamptonshire. I have completed the Digital Health.London Pioneer Fellowship and Digital Health Leadership Academy programme. I am proud to be co vice chair of the CCIO advisory panel, Faculty of Clinical Informatics and Shuri Network member.
Dr Penny Kechagioglou
CCIO and deputy CMO, University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust
Dr Kechagioglou is the Chief Clinical Information Officer, deputy Chief Medical Officer and Consultant Clinical Oncologist at the University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire. She is Vice-Chair of the Digital Health Networks CCIO Advisory Panel, with research and professional interest in healthcare innovation, digital health and leadership.
Johanna Kelly
senior nursing information officer, Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust
I am Johanna Kelly the CNIO and CSO in Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells, a role that has created huge opportunities and exposure to exciting projects and wonderful colleagues! I am responsible for championing digital technology as an intrinsic part of clinician’s daily activities and the benefits this can achieve, providing leadership support for innovation, and optimising digital systems. I am currently co-chair of the National Digital Shared Decision-Making Council a position I am extremely proud of, driving a positive supportive culture, promoting collaborative leadership and inspiring the next generation of digital clinicians.
Alun Kime
cyber security contracts manager, Digital Health and Care Wales
Alun joined the NHS in April 2023 having worked in Local Government for the previous 20 years. During that time, he held the position of Information Governance Manager and Data Protection Officer.
Alun is passionate about protecting the confidentiality of data but equally ensuring that data can be relied upon to make good decisions and available to those relying on it.
Increasingly organisations are reliant on 3rd parties to achieve some, if not all of this, so he was delighted to be offered the opportunity to join the Digital Health & Care Wales cyber security team focussing on supply chain security.
Jacob Koris
orthopaedic surgeon, Oxford University Hospitals NHS FT; and clinical lead for digital projects, GIRFT
Jacob Koris is an Orthopaedic Surgeon with over a decade of clinical experience. Having spent a year as the National Medical Directors Clinical Fellow working for NHSEI in Transformation, he’s focused on the utilisation of digital solutions to improve healthcare. Now leading several projects as a Clinical Lead for Digital Projects at GIRFT, he is focused on the safe and effective deployment of new technologies in the NHS.
George Kowalski
vice president of business development, ORCHA Health
George is a highly experienced and successful individual in Product and Business Management with a demonstrable history of working effectively within the NHS and Private sectors.
George has worked with NHS Foundation Trusts throughout the UK and successfully facilitated shared strategy to improve outcomes and reduce health inadequacies within healthcare organisations in Gibraltar, South Africa, Australia and throughout the UAE.
George joined ORCHA at the beginning of August 2019 with the intention of using his knowledge and experience of Primary and Secondary care to assist ORCHA’s customers to experience the full benefit of the ORCHA solution through digital Healthcare.
Additionally, George’s goal is to ensure that the very best reviewed and accredited Health and Care applications are made available to all Healthcare professionals as well as to the digital community worldwide.
Bethany Kruger
senior improvement manager, NHS Wales Executive Digital
Beth is a proud and dedicated Registered Nurse for people with a learning disability, their families, and carers. She has over 30 years of experience supporting people with a learning disability, their families and carers and has worked in a range of settings which include, community and inpatient NHS services, private sector, academia, and improvement. Beth is currently a Florence Nightingale Foundation Digital Scholar and is enthusiastic about user centre design and improving health outcomes for people with a learning disability.
As a Senior Improvement Manager for Improvement Cymru, Beth is leading on the delivery of a national improvement programme across Wales for people with a learning disability, their families, and carers. Improvement Cymru is the improvement service for NHS Wales and aims to support the design and implementation of the best quality health and care system for Wales, ensuring everyone has access to safe, effective, and efficient care at the right time and in the right place.
Beth understands the barriers for people with a learning disability, their families and carers often face and appreciates their level of health need, yet often they are the most excluded.
Although not an expert in digital technology Beth believes digital technology can challenge and address health inequalities and inequities for people with a learning disability and their families and welcomes the digital future and the benefits this may bring.
Kelvin Lack
head of projects and development, Northamptonshire Healthcare NHS FT
Kelvin has over 20 years project management and development experience within the NHS in Northamptonshire. He currently oversees an ambitious programme of activity covering infrastructure, clinical and innovative developmental projects.
Prof Regent Lee
associate professor of vascular surgery, University of Oxford
Amy Lochtie
innovation hub director, West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership
Amy leads the West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership’s Innovation and Improvement Hub which embeds Health Innovation Yorkshire & Humber into the West Yorkshire Integrated Care System. The Hub is the designed to identify and deliver the adoption and spread of innovation across the West Yorkshire system, and to cultivate innovation networks and key strategic partnerships.
Prior to her role in Health Innovation Yorkshire & Humber (HIYH), Amy has been a frontline clinical nurse in both Adult and Neonatal Intensive Care, as well as undertaking core roles within strategic healthcare transformation during the COVID pandemic. Amy is a member of both the NHS Assembly and the Northwest Clinical Senate providing leadership and experience to NHS England Executive teams shaping the Long-Term Plan.
Markus Bolton
executive director, Graphnet
Speaker Session
- - Keynote: A systems view on money, digital, the NHS and UK economy - November 27, 2023
Director of Graphnet Health, Markus Bolton has 44 years of experience in the software industry with a specialist focus on healthcare informatics since 1993. Markus was founder and CEO of System C Healthcare from 1983 to early 2022 and has been a director and major shareholder of Graphnet since 2012. During that time Markus has been involved with many aspects of the business including strategy, growth and mergers and acquisitions.
Markus is an enthusiastic supporter of improving health and social care through data and process transformation and as part of that focus is heavily involved in Graphnet’s population health work.
Dr Piyush Mahapatra
chief innovation officer, Open Medical and consultant trauma and orthopaedic surgeon and division digital and innovation lead for surgery, cancer, and anaesthetics, West Hertfordshire Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust
He is an NHS Innovation Accelerator Fellow and serves as the Chief Innovation Officer at Open Medical.
In his role at Open Medical, Piyush has been instrumental in steering sustainable digital transformation across 150+ healthcare sites. As a leader in research and development, he oversees initiatives in sustainability, clinical trials, evaluations, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) projects. Beyond leadership, Piyush actively contributes to product development, ensuring Open Medical continues to address real-world challenges. His unique expertise in both medicine and technology allows him to seamlessly integrate these disciplines, driving the creation of innovative solutions.
Misbah Mahmood
deputy chief midwifery information officer, Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS FT
I have been a qualified midwife for 10 years and 5 years in digital at LTHT. I have successfully led on several l projects across maternity services, Including an end-to-end electronic patient record, secure online notes portal.
Being a member of the Digital Midwives Expert Reference Group and as the first elected midwife on the Digital Health CNIO advisory council, I have seen first-hand the value of networking. I am honoured to also be a Florence Nightingale Digital Alumni. When undertaking digital transformation, it is my responsibility as Chief Midwifery Information Officer to make sure the clinical voice is heard.
Dr Rizwan Malik
consultant radiologist, Bolton NHS FT; and managing director, South Manchester Radiology
Dr Rizwan Malik is a leading radiologist with an interest in health tech, digital imaging, and the potential of AI to support clinicians and patients.
Rizwan studied medicine in Cambridge and London before qualifying as a radiologist. He joined what is now Bolton NHS Foundation Trust in 2006 and has held a number of increasingly senior roles at the organisation, where he became divisional medical director in 2020.
Alongside his career in radiology, he has been a clinical advisor to leading imaging suppliers, and is managing director of South Manchester Radiology, a consultancy that advises the health service and vendors on transformation and innovation, with a focus on imaging and AI.
He is the immediate Past-President of UKIO – the largest Imaging and Oncology conference in the UK – where he worked to diversify the range of presentations and engage the supplier community in shared learning activities.
Rizwan says his priority is to see healthcare make similar gains in the future. “Both the healthcare system and its suppliers need to be asking: how can we go further?” he says.
Miranda Mapleton
CEO, White Swan CIO
Miranda is the CEO and founder of the White Swan, a registered Charity on a mission to improve health for society using technology and analytics, working with academia, charities, government and companies globally, with partners such as the Royal Marsden Hospital, British Heart Foundation and Bayer Pharmaceuticals. White Swan specialise in leveraging large volumes of social data combined with their Million Minds AI insights platform to bring the patient voice to the heart of healthcare innovation and improvement.
Since graduating in Business Management in the 90s, Miranda held various senior Marketing Director and CMO roles within global businesses like PepsiCo, Mars and MoneySuperMarket, and now combines running the charity with other Business and Marketing consulting with SMEs and global businesses across multiple sectors.
Claire Marsh
cancer PIFU project lead, University Hospital Southampton NHS FT
Claire Marsh (RN, ANP BSc (Hons), NMP IP, Cancer Leadership MSc)
Cancer Patient Initiated Follow Up (PIFU) Project Lead – University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust.
Senior Programme Manager for Treatments & Personalised Care – Wessex Cancer Alliance.
Claire has worked within cancer care since 1996 & qualified as an Advanced Nurse Practitioner (ANP) in 2006. Since this time Claire has successfully implemented numerous service improvement projects in cancer care at local hospital level and more strategically across the Wessex Cancer Alliance.
Claire currently works one a day week at University Hospital Southampton (UHS) NHS Foundation Trust managing the Cancer Patient Initiated Follow Up (PIFU) Project. This includes working collaboratively with the “MyMedicalRecord” digital team & cancer specialties.
Since June 2021 Claire has also been working with the Wessex Cancer Alliance, initially project managing the Systemic Anti-Cancer Therapy Closer to Home project. From January 2024 Claire is now a Senior Programme Manager for Treatments & Personalised Care at the cancer alliance.
Jenny Mason
digital strategy workstream lead (digital inclusion lead), NHS Cheshire and Merseyside
Jenny began her NHS career in the Cheshire and Merseyside Health and Care Partnership in January 2020, following an extensive 17 year career in Health and Social Care. She has taken the lead on many Digital Inclusion Projects and collaboration work across the Integrated Care System since the summer of 2020, when the rising demand for digital services was seen due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Jenny has been described as ‘authentically real, creative and passionate about inclusivity’. Most recently, Jenny coordinated and developed a collaborative approach to Digital Inclusion in Cheshire and Merseyside. This included the production of a Cheshire and Merseyside Digital Inclusion Group and network and design and the launch of a Digital Inclusion Approach and Toolkit, that is now extensively used across Cheshire and Merseyside. Jenny also led the launch of a successful Digital Adoption campaign to encourage the use of digital and technology for supporting people’s health, wellbeing and care needs.
Amongst other things, Jenny is also a Zumba Fitness instructor, baker, avid reader, Vice President of her local Women’s Institute and she enjoys holidays home or abroad with her family.
Anthony May
chief executive officer, Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust
Anthony took up the post of Chief Executive of Nottingham University Hospitals (NUH) in September 2022. NUH is one of the country’s biggest and busiest acute teaching hospitals and is the largest employer in Nottinghamshire, employing more than 18,000 people. Before his current role, Anthony was one of the longest-serving Chief Executives of Nottinghamshire County Council.
Anthony has substantial experience delivering strategic improvements to meet local and national priorities. Following his first 100 days in post, and extensive consultation with key internal and external stakeholders, People First was published. People First frames the organisation’s three strategic priorities, and sets a framework for improvement and the future direction of the Trust.
In 2023, Anthony was appointed as a Deputy Lieutenant for Nottinghamshire and has been awarded an OBE in the King’s Birthday Honours list 2023 for his services to local government.
Caroline McCallum
clinical lead speech and language therapist, Homerton Healthcare NHS FT and co-Founder of Verbo
Caroline has worked as a children’s Speech and Language Therapist (SaLT) in London for almost fifteen years, her work has been with across the NHS, Local Authorities and Independent Practice. Experience has included working in mainstream and special primary and secondary schools with a clinical specialism in Autism.
As co-founder of Verbo, Caroline has collaborated with Blum Health Ltd. and successfully secured four grants which have resulted in the development of a Speech and Language Therapy platform to provide: screening, interventions & activities and training for early years, schools, post-16. Verbo provides instant access to a toolkit that upskills education professionals with resources to support Children and Young People. Responding to the nationwide shortfall of SaLTs, the platform also aims to build capacity and increase efficiencies for therapists.
Dr Carey McClellan
founder and CEO, getUBetter
Dr Carey McClellan is the Founder and CEO of getUBetter.
getUBetter is an evidence based, CE marked, digital self-management platform for all common musculoskeletal conditions and women’s pelvic health. getUBetter supports Integrated Care Systems and Health Boards to deliver digital self-management across their entire care pathways. It helps patients trust their recovery, have the confidence to self-manage and use less healthcare resource (safe self-management but referring people back into the system when needed). Carey is a physiotherapist, has a PhD in health economics, acute musculoskeletal injury and urgent care. Carey has a research background and has published many peer reviewed articles. He leads a team of clinicians (physiotherapists / doctors), developers, digital health specialists and transformational change experts.
Matthew McCormick
managing director, McCormickCo Security and UK Healthcare CISO adviser, Armis
Matt is the Managing Director of McCormickCo Security and a UK Healthcare CISO adviser to Armis. Matt has over 20 years of experience in the IT industry, with a focus on infrastructure, operations, and security. His core competencies include developing and implementing cybersecurity strategies, policies, and standards, conducting penetration testing and vulnerability assessments, delivering managed services and incident response, and providing virtual CISO and advisory services.
Catherine Mclennan
programme director, Cheshire and Merseyside Women’s Health and Maternity ICB
Catherine has led on service transformation as Programme Director for Cheshire and Merseyside Women’s and Children’s Services Partnership since 2014. Since June 2021 she has led on the establishment of the Women’s Health and Maternity Vision and Programme for Cheshire and Merseyside, as Programme Director.
Her role provides leadership for the Local Maternity and Neonatal System as SRO and setting out a vision, strategy and service improvements for all areas of women’s health; including reducing health inequalities and implementing initiatives which improve clinical outcomes and the wellbeing of women, babies and families. She is an advocate of social prescribing and community engagement and a working mum of 3 children. She is a Trustee of the University of Liverpool Maths College and is a champion for young people, lifelong learning and workforce development.
Jennifer Mearns
midwifery informatics lead, Oxford University Hospitals NHS FT
Jennifer has been a Midwife for 17 years, working in various roles both in the NHS and private sector. The majority of her career has been within the community setting, and this is where her passion for the safe use of digital systems grew and was further cemented during whilst working as a risk Midwife. Her interest in the digital Maternity roles bought her to Oxford University Hospitals Foundation Trust where she has been working as the Senior Digital Midwifery Informatics Lead for over 3 years.
In this pivotal role, she leads on the digital programme within Maternity, ensuring the safe use of safe digital technologies, enabling exceptional care and excellent user experiences for both our staff and the families we support.
In addition to her role at Oxford University Hospitals, Jennifer also chairs the South East Region Digital Maternity Expert Reference Group, working with other Digital Midwives and people working within the Maternity arena, contributing insights and leadership to shape the future of digital maternity care across the region and also links in with other regional Chairs as part of the national chairs group.
John Mitchell
associate director of digital, NHS Humber and North Yorkshire ICB
John has enjoyed over 20 years in the NHS Health Space, working within Primary Care, CCG, ICB and Support Services arenas.
A champion for connected systems and data, John is keen to empower clinicians and patients by ensuring that they have access to the right information to support their requirements.
Dr Jessica Morley
postdoctoral researcher, Digital Ethics Center, Yale University
Dr. Jessica Morley has worked in NHS data, tech, and AI policy for the past ten years. Originally working in the NHS and the Department of Health and Social Care, she transitioned to working full-time in academia in 2019: working for the Bennett Institute of Applied Data Science at the University of Oxford on OpenSAFELY and the Goldacre Review until April 2023.
Now, having completed her PhD “Designing an algorithmically enhanced NHS”, also at the University of Oxford, she is a postdoctoral researcher at the Yale Digital Ethics Center. All Jess’s work focuses on ensuring healthcare systems can capitalise on the opportunities of better use of data, whilst mitigating the ethical harms.
Laura Moss
lead AHP for digital, York and Scarborough Teaching Hospitals NHS FT
Sara Nelson
programme director, DigitalHealth.London
Tom Newman
AI technical leader, IBM Consulting
Rosselyn Ngadze
obstetric consultant, Doncaster & Bassetlaw Hospitals NHS Trust
I am a Consultant in Obstetrics and Gynaecology at Doncaster Royal Infirmary. I have a keen interest on health promotion and reducing health inequalities which led me to co-founding the Book Before Ten campaign. This campaign seeks to encourage timely antenatal care particularly in high risk groups. Its message key points are individualising the care we provide to meet the communities we serve and shared learning.
Simon Noel
CNIO, Oxford University Hospitals NHS FT
Simon has worked with clinical informatics for the past 20 years and leads a team of informatics nurses, working collaboratively with clinical, technical and organisational services. Simon is a member of the CNIO advisory panel for Digital Health, he is also on the Faculty of Clinical Informatics working groups for Professionalism, the Office of the CCIO, the FCI Nursing and Midwifery Advisory Panel, and contributed toward the What Good Looks Like Nursing Guidance, participating in the launch at Rewired in 2022.
Natalie Nunes
consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist, Chelsea and Westminster Hospital Trust and West Middlesex Hospital
Miss Natalie Nunes is a consultant Obstetrician Gynaecologist at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital Trust and West Middlesex Hospital since 2013. She is the Lead for the Early Pregnancy Unit and is an advocate for utilising #FemTech to improve #womenshealth and #patientexperience.
Natalie completed the inaugural Horizon Fellowship in 2023 at CW+ and DigitalHealth.London where she launched a Virtual Ward and app for women experiencing excessive nausea and vomiting in early pregnancy. With her colleague, she has also won funding for project Eirene for the Use of Virtual Reality (VR) Headsets by patients having Outpatient Management of Miscarriage by Manual Vacuum Aspiration.
Nick O’Reilly
director of digital, NHS Birmingham and Solihull ICB
Dr Crystal Oldman
chief executive, The Queen’s Nursing Institute
Dr Crystal Oldman CBE is Chief Executive of The Queen’s Nursing Institute (“The QNI”).
Crystal was awarded a CBE in 2017 for services to community nursing and her leadership of The QNI. Crystal is a Fellow of the Royal College of Nursing and a Trustee of the Nuffield Trust.
Louis Ovonlen
lead pharmacist community services, South West London and St George’s Mental Health Trust
Louis is a Lead Pharmacist with over 25 years’ experience in mental health within NHS Trusts. He is passionate about the development of mental health services and promotes innovation in this area. He is currently leading the Community Transformation Agenda for Pharmacy within South West London and St Georges Mental Health.
Dr Annabelle Painter
NHS doctor, clinical AI fellow, Artificial Intelligence Centre for Value Based Healthcare and medical director, Visiba
Annabelle Painter is an NHS doctor and honorary fellow in digital health at Imperial College London (UK). She previously worked as a Clinical AI & workforce fellow at HEE & the NHS AI Lab exploring AI confidence in the healthcare workforce.
Annabelle also works as Medical Director with Visiba, where she oversees the AI-enabled triage system deployed within the NHS. Annabelle is a practising GP registrar and sits on the Royal Society of medicine Digital Health council.
James Palmer
programme lead, population health management, NHS Surrey Heartlands ICS
James has led the Population Health Management programme in Surrey Heartlands since 2022. He joined the NHS from the MoD in 2020, bringing with him over 20 years’ experience in leading operational teams and integrated planning.
Since then, he has worked on Population Health, the Covid vaccination programme and in his previous role managed two Primary Care Networks. He is passionate about developing a shared purpose and bridging the gap with colleagues across the local health and care partnership.
Dr Pahini Pandya
CEO and founder, Panakeia Technologies
Dr Pahini Pandya is the CEO and Founder of Panakeia Technologies, which enables rapid multi-omics profiling in minutes directly from routinely used tissue images, using AI and without the need for wet-lab assays. Trained as a cancer researcher Dr. Pahini Pandya spent the last decade furthering translational research in the field.
She pursued a PhD in cancer biophysics at King’s College London, a postdoc at the University of Cambridge and has several publications in top journals. Educated at the Stanford and Cambridge business schools, Pahini has also held several leadership positions across entrepreneurial organisations and helped numerous start-ups commercialise research.
She has been recognised as Global Shaper by the World Economic Forum, and received multiple awards for entrepreneurship.
Prof William Parry-Smith
clinical academic, Keele University; honorary consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist, The Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust
Jenny Partridge
innovation manager, Health Innovation Kent Surrey Sussex
Jenny’s mission is to make healthcare work better for patients and staff through innovation. She is an engineer by background, with a particular interest in how digital technology can support better healthcare. Jenny worked for many years in primary care management setting up new services and medical centres, and recognises the huge potential of AI to address service and workload challenges.
Alan Payne
group product and engineering director, The Access Group
Alan is an executive level Digital and Technology leader with over 30 years in Healthcare, Health Insurance, Banking and Capital Markets, bringing digital innovation, vision, knowledge, drive and the ability to deliver globally across multiple businesses and support functions.
He’s held executive technology and engineering leadership positions at Sensyne Health, Aetna International, Nuffield Health, BUPA Merrill Lynch, Oracle and CTO at JPMorganChase.
Alan is now Group Product and Engineering Director for the Health, Support & Care division at the Access Group. Here he is responsible for the overall vision, direction and delivery of the technology for this crucial group of customers, as they aim to meet the twin aspirations of digitisation and integrated health and care.
He also holds an Honorary Professorship at the UCL Faculty of Engineering (Intelligent Systems) and has specific research interests in Digital Health, Artificial Intelligence and Entrepreneurship.
Andy Percival
managing director, Publisure
Andy Percival is the Managing Director of Publisure. Offering a cost-effective middleware platform, Publisure is a fully-integrated, non-proprietary, multi-channel communications platform that integrates inbound and outbound communications using a single unified workflow and interface.
Andy has over thirty years’ experience delivering practical, cost-effective digital communication strategies across both the NHS and Local Government marketplaces.
Emmanuel Phillips
research manager, Digital Health Intelligence
Emmanuel is a graduate from Warwick University with five years of professional experience in digital healthcare. He currently leads as Research Manager at Digital Health, focusing on advancing the widely-used Intelligence product within the NHS and among software suppliers. Alongside this, he spearheads the development of an NHS-oriented AI Chatbot for the Digital Health Intelligence service.
Dr Sheuli Porkess
chief medical officer, Precisia, a C2-Ai business
Dr Sheuli Porkess is Chief Medical Officer and Business Unit Director, Precisia Life Sciences, a C2-Ai business.
Sheuli is a highly experienced and respected leader in life sciences. Sheuli originally trained in medicine at Cambridge and Oxford then worked in the NHS before moving to pharmaceutical medicine. Sheuli has worked internationally in medical affairs, clinical development and life science policy.
She is the Vice President of the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Medicine, a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London and a Global Fellow in Medicines Development with IFAPP.
Sheuli is a members of a number of advisory groups including the Steering Group for the UKRI Multiple Long-Term Conditions Programme, the AoMRC Genomics Professional Partnerships Group and the UK Pharmacogenetics and Stratified Medicine Network Steering Group.
Sheuli is also a visiting lecturer at King’s College London.
Dr Caroline Pritchard
consultant anesthetist and perioperative service clinical lead, Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS FT
In BHT we have recently developed, tested and deployed Population Health Dashboards to help us streamline our perioperative pathway both clinically and operationally. This has attracted collaboration from our community colleagues, as well as offering a vision to standardize the surgical pathway across the ICS with the potential for more widespread efficiencies.
Prof Julia Sutcliffe
chief scientific adviser, Department for Business and Trade
Speaker Session
- - Keynote: A systems view on money, digital, the NHS and UK economy - November 27, 2023
Dr Ragu Rajan
senior partner, Wealden Ridge Medical Partnership; GP trainer, PCN CD, & Sussex ICB GP partner member
Ragu Rajan is a practicing NHS GP and the Senior Partner at Wealden Ridge Medical Partnership a GP Practice of 22,000 in East Sussex. He is also the Clinical Director of Greater Wealden Primary Care Network (a network of practices around Uckfield in East Sussex with a population of 60,000), a GP Trainer, and sits on the Sussex Integrated Care Board as the GP partner member. He is also the honorary treasurer of the Royal Society of Medicine Primary Care Section.
Prof Daniel Ray
CTO, Birmingham Women’s and Children’s NHS FT; and professor of Health Informatics, UCL
Daniel Ray has worked in health technology and informatics for over 20 years. He is CTO and DPO of Birmingham Womens and Childrens NHS FT where he has been since January 2020. He has with his team and clinical staff driven forward the development, use and uptake of technology during the COVID pandemic crisis and now onto the Trusts EPRs for their different services. He is also a NED/Trustee on the board of an allergy charity NARF and historically in his previous role was Director of Data at NHS Digital; responsible for developing the organisation’s data capability. Daniel was the product owner of the new national data services platform. Daniel in his national role was responsible for all technical data and product delivery for the £50m Data Insights and Statistics Directorate, and lead a number of operational teams. Prior to this he was Director of Informatics at a large teaching hospital in England, where he transformed the health informatics service, set up a quality outcomes research unit, and developed a patient portal among other work programmes.
Dr Paul Rice
chief digital and information officer, Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS FT and Airedale NHS FT
Dr Paul Rice joined Bradford and Airedale NHS Foundation Trusts from his role as Regional Director of Digital Transformation for NHS England and NHS Improvement in the North East and Yorkshire. He leads on the delivery of digital programmes across both organisations and at Place within our Act as One Programme. This work includes driving forward Airedale’s ambition as a Digital Aspirant to secure an enterprise wide Electronic Patient Record, updating and improving the Infrastructure, Networks and Cyber resilience of both organisations, and leading major digital system upgrades including Laboratory Imaging Systems.
He is committed to programmes of inclusive digital transformation and passionate about diversifying the skills base and creating professional career opportunities for current and future digital and data workforces. He is also a firm believer in information technology being a means to an end not an end in itself.
Emma Richardson
programme manager for primary care innovation, Health Innovation North East & North Cumbria
Emma Richardson is a seasoned professional with a diverse background, currently serving as a Programme Manager at Health Innovation North East and North Cumbria since January 2022. In this role, she demonstrates her innovative way of thinking and organizational skills to help drive digital innovation in Primary Care.
Prior to her current position, Emma was a Clinical Trial Coordinator of Phase I/II oncology trials within Newcastle Hospitals NHS Trust, where she contributed significantly to the coordination and execution of clinical trials.
Emma’s journey into working in healthcare began with her role as a Breastfeeding Support Worker at Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, demonstrating her passion for community health and maternal support.
With a comprehensive background in both clinical and corporate roles, Emma is dedicated to driving positive change in healthcare, utilising her expertise and experience to contribute to the advancement of innovative solutions and programs in the North East and North Cumbria region.
Lee Rickles
CIO, programme director and deputy SIRO, Humber Teaching Hospitals NHS FT and Yorkshire and Humber Care Record
He is a member of the CIO advisory board, a CHIME Certificated Health Chief Information Officer and alumni of the Digital Academy. He has three decades transformation and programme management experience. His first decade focused on UK military aircraft project for the T-45 Goshawk, Sea Harrier, AV-8B and Nimrod. During the last two decades, he has focused on digital transformation in the NHS, Information Technology services and Business Intelligence for NHS organisations. He has also had significant experience in the development of change strategies; digital developments and procurement of Information Technology Services and systems.
He is currently is leading the development of the Yorkshire & Humber Care Record, Digital transformation of Humber Coast & Vale ICS and the CIO of Humber Teaching NHS Foundation Trust.
Rami Riman
director of clinical and business improvements, EMEA, InterSystems
Rami Riman leverages clinical best practices across multiple healthcare disciplines through the optimised use of InterSystems healthcare and data technology solutions. By helping customers improve their workflows Rami reinforces their support for patient safety, improved efficiencies, and increased the benefit and value of their health solutions. He has extensive consultancy experience in healthcare IT, including change management consultancy, professional accreditation, hospital workflow management, and realizing a return on investment.
Prior to joining InterSystems, Rami gained a decade of clinical experience across multiple hospitals in the US, UK, Lebanon, and UAE. Rami’s passion remains in increasing patient engagement to improve community’s health and awareness. He holds a B.A. from the American University of Beirut in Biology, a Doctorate in Medicine from St. George’s University School of Medicine and a Master’s degree in infectious diseases from the University of London. Rami is board certified in Internal Medicine and Medical Oncology.
Dr Tim Ringrose
CEO, Cognitant Group and president of the Digital Health Section, Royal Society Medicine
A nephrologist and intensive care specialist by training, Tim is an experienced health technology entrepreneur. Tim was CEO of Doctors.net.uk and M3 (EU) before co-founding Cognitant Group. He is immediate past president of the Digital health council at the Royal Society of Medicine and a non-executive director and adviser for several other health technology companies.
Becca Robinson
digital nurse specialist, Sussex Community NHS FT
Becca is a registered nurse, currently a digital clinical specialist at Sussex Community Foundation NHS Trust. Working in the digital space since 2021, Becca is a member of the first cohort of Fed-IP 35 under 35 Future Digital Health Leaders. She is currently working in a clinical safety role on a variety of digital transformation projects within a community trust. Championing digital health and digital inclusion, Becca is a nurse advocate for technology and informatics.
Dione Rogers
deputy chief nurse and chief nursing informatics officer, Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS FT
Experienced leader and CNIO. Registered general nurse for twenty six years. Women in Tech Excellence Award ‘Digital Leader of the Year 2020’, Florence Nightingale Digital Scholar 2021, and CNIO influencer. Experienced nurse and leader with a demonstrated history of working in the hospital and healthcare industry. Bachelor of Science (BSc) in Professional Practice from the The University of Northampton. Currently studying Healthcare Analytics and Artificial Intelligence MSc at Sheffield Hallan University. Chair of the Midlands CNIO network. Thrilled to have recently received CNO Silver Award for services to digital nursing from Ruth May.
Flavia Rovis
senior technology strategist, Microsoft UK
Flavia Rovis is a senior technology strategist within Healthcare and Life Sciences sector at Microsoft UK. Her professional experience is at the intersection of healthcare and information technology having spent over 15 years in consulting and implementation of electronic patient records, big data and AI platforms. As a senior strategist at Microsoft, Flavia works as a trusted adviser to healthcare organisations, ideating and designing solutions that accelerate business transformation through technology innovation.
Flavia has a degree in Chemistry and Pharmaceutical Technologies and a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Immunology.
Martin Sadler
executive director of information technology and digital, Sandwell and West Birmingham NHS Trust
Martin has been an IT director across multiple sectors for over 20 years and continue to learn. He is in his 6th year of being an NHS CIO. Martin advocates for new ways of delivering internal IT services, promoting aspirational idleness and have written a book (being published this spring) on how to survive being a CIO. His team has moved multiple services to the cloud, done interesting discoveries with Artificial Intelligence and are currently working on opening a new hospital in the Autumn.
Prof Liz Sapey
co-chair, information governance and ethics workstream, West Midlands Secure Data Environment
Liz is a Consultant in Respiratory Medicine and the Director of Pioneer – the Health Data Research UK (HDR UK)–funded Data Hub. She is based at University of Birmingham and is the Director of the Institute of Inflammation and Ageing.
Jacqui Sarakbi
director of urgent, emergency care and mental health, NHS Kent and Medway ICB
Jacqui Sarakbi started her career in clinical research and worked for many years in hospitals and universities both within Australia and the UK before joining the NHS. She has held roles within providers; commissioning roles at place, system and regional levels prior to joining the national NHSE UEC team. Her current role is Director of UEC and Mental Health (Unplanned Care) with the NHS Kent and Medway ICB working across UEC and Mental Health commissioning, transformation and improvement, as well as the Kent and Medway Operational Control Centre.
Oliver Savage
advanced clinical pharmacist and clinical safety officer for the ePMA system, Leeds Teaching Hospitals
My career began with care of the elderly and learning disabilities within the community before leading onto becoming a Registered Midwife 14 years ago. My career took an unanticipated turn when my passion of how patient care and clinical practice could be enhanced using technology when leading on the implementation of a Maternity EPR System. It was during this period that I was able to expand my vision beyond maternity and see the benefits of clinically motivated, technology enhanced care, thus leading to my current position 4 years ago as an Associate Nursing Informatics Officer.
I am committed to staying at the forefront of healthcare technical development and innovation and am currently engaged within a Florence Nightingale Digital Leadership Scholarship Programme along with aiming to commence a MSc in Senior Leadership in 2024.
My international membership with the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) attests to my global perspective and commitment to advancing healthcare through technology. I am passionate about leveraging technology to elevate patient care standards and contribute to the strategic design of clinical processes. My expertise, dedication and commitment are an asset to the healthcare and tech community as it continues with the Digital Revolution.
Clinton Schick
chief executive, Strata Health
An experienced leader with a pedigree of international strategic business development and operational delivery. Over 30 years’ experience in Tier 1 global business enterprise and two decades advocating for advanced technology supporting patient flow across health and social care.
An evangelist for optimising patient-flow across global health eco-systems by established cross-organisational collaboration, underpinned by intelligent technology and pragmatic change management.
Dedicated to building efficiencies and future sustainability for health and care ecosystems; delivering better patient outcomes and experience.
Alumni of U of M Business School, University of Oxford Continuing Professional Development, A Member of The Institute of Directors – MoD and The Institute of Healthcare Management.
Natalie Schofield
digital maturity programme lead, NHS Transformation Directorate, NHS England
Amrit Kaur Sehmi
digital transformation project manager, Moorfields Eye Hospital and orthoptic clinical educator, UCL
Amrit is an experienced Orthoptist and currently working in a dual role as Digital Transformation Project Manager at Moorfields Eye Hospital and UCL Orthoptic Clinical Educator. She previously completed the Darzi fellowship, where she led on the agenda of digital exclusion for Moorfields, working towards solutions for digital inclusion for patients and staff.”
Haris Shuaib
CEO, Newton’s Tree, and head of CSC, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS FT
Haris Shuaib is CEO of Newton’s Tree, a company that delivers an enterprise AI platform to healthcare organisations to help them evaluate, deploy, and monitor 3rd party AI solutions.
Haris is also a healthcare professional and currently Consultant Clinical Scientist and Head of the Clinical Scientific Computing section at Guy’s & St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, where his team are developing people, platforms, and policy for digital health.
Finally, he also holds a NIHR Doctoral Research Fellowship, where he is leading a national multi-centre trial to see whether AI can improve the treatment of glioblastoma.
Mindy Simon
co-director, NHS Innovation Accelerator
She has spent much of her extensive career working in the health and life sciences sector, holding senior leadership and operational roles across health and higher education institutions. She began her healthcare career overseas, running a private primary care practice before continuing her career in the UK establishing the organisational structure of a department focused on alternative therapies education at prestigious institutions such as the University of Oxford, and King’s College London.
Rahul Singal
chief pharmacy and medicines information officer, NHS England
Rahul is currently the Associate CCIO for Medicines at NHSE, where he holds SRO accountability for the Digital and Interoperable Medicines Programme. As the designated Chief Pharmaceutical Officer lead for any national digital improvement programmes, Rahul holds the responsibility for any specific medicines related work and will also provide professional leadership for the pharmacy informatics workforce and related workforce development.
Rahul has held several leadership positions across NHS organisations and ALBs, most recently he was the Chief Pharmacist at NELFT. He has been involved in digital projects that include the deployment of; hospital-based medicines automation, EPMA, EPS2, E-Job Planning and working with partners to define pharmacy and medicines related performance metrics. Rahul is also Health Foundation Generation Q Fellow.
Clive Star
director for cyber security, technology and architecture, KPMG
Clive is a Consulting Director in Cyber Security, Technology and Architecture. Clive has over 30 years NHS experience in local, regional and national roles and until recently was the Deputy Director for Security Strategy in NHS England. In addition to cybersecurity Clive was previously the lead architect for national NHS infrastructure services including NHSmail and HSCN.
Maddie Szekely
deputy director of digital and data services, Bolton NHS FT
Maddie began her NHS career as an NHS Informatics Graduate Management Trainee, and has been Deputy Director of Digital and Data Services at Bolton NHS Foundation Trust for the last 18 months. Her broad experience working in both digital and non-digital roles has given her a unique perspective on what is needed to build effective digital teams, which she has demonstrated through the successful deployment and configuration of the trust’s electronic patient record.
Ming Tang
chief data and analytics Officer, NHS England
Ming has over 20 years’ experience in managing and delivering large scale change involving implementation of new operating models in complex and challenging environments.
She joined the NHS in October 2009, initially leading commissioning support services in the West Midlands as the Managing Director for Healthcare Commissioning Services and then as the Managing Director for South Yorkshire and Bassetlaw Commissioning Support Unit.
Ming is currently the Chief Data and Analytics Officer for NHS England responsible for strategic development of data and analytics capability across NHS.
Chris Taylor
director of partnerships, Isla Care
Chris is the Partnerships Director at Isla. He is an Economist by training, and completed his MSc at Bocconi University in Milan. Chris has a huge passion for optimising healthcare systems and the importance of accessible patient care in driving flourishing economies.
Whilst at Isla, Chris has led on large-scale transformation programmes with the NHS, delivering multi million pound savings, and takes this experience of change management into designing sustainable and impactful projects with Isla’s partners.
Becky Thomas
leadership development facilitator, Florence Nightingale Foundation
Becky Thomas is a recognised nurse leader and she joins FNF as a Leadership Development Facilitator.
You might know her as the host and founder of the Leadership Log Podcast, the creator of #High5Friday, and an active Florence Nightingale Foundation (FNF) Champion and Alumni Member.
A Proud Nurse. Passionate about making a difference. Disruptor. Interested in leadership, human factors, safety science, behaviour and culture, entrepreneurship and digital.
Becky has been studying Psychological Safety and is passionate about championing and supporting building and maintaining psychological safety in teams across the professions.
A creative, innovative, and enthusiastic individual with a great passion for nursing and is motivated to improve standards of dignity and care for patients and promote the professional identity of nursing.
Having 28 years of experience within a wide variety of services, has provided her with comprehensive, highly specialised, and detailed professional knowledge.
Described as having an authentic appreciation of the needs and experiences of staff delivering direct care, with high energy levels and enthusiasm for leadership and quality improvement which is extremely motivating for the staff she engages with. She has the insight to know that she can always learn and enjoys gaining knowledge and sharing best practice.
A Self-confessed geek. Apple Fan Girl. Vinyl Junkie. Book Nerd. Mountain Biker and Dog lover.
She is also, generally, very active on twitter @CuriousBecks
Sarah Thomas
director of digital, New Hospital Programme
Sarah has worked with large acute hospitals and more latterly across STP’s developing and delivering pioneering digital strategies and implementing complex digital systems to support healthcare objectives. She has supported organisations to articulate and plan their information, technology and innovation objectives with a strong focus on clinical and operational transformation and outcomes.
Sarah Thompson
CCIO, Wirral University Teaching Hospitals NHS FT
Sarah is a Pharmacist and CCIO at Wirral University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. Nominated by the Pharmaceutical Journal as a ‘Woman to Watch 2022’ Sarah is proud to be one of the first Pharmacist CCIO’s nationally.
A passionate advocate for career development for non-medical CCIOs, Sarah is determined to see further representation from Pharmacy, AHP, Nursing and Midwifery colleagues nationally. Sarah’s main areas of interest include clinical engagement, clinical safety, & optimisation of digital systems.
Sharon Toora
lead arrhythmia nurse specialist, Mid and South Essex University Hospitals Group
Sharon Toora is the Lead Arrhythmia nurse specialist of the Essex Cardiothoracic Centre, Basildon. She has over 20 years cardiology experience working with patients who have complex arrhythmia and device related pathology. She has pioneered the development of the nurse-led end to end pathways to managing patients with arrhythmias.
As a Cardiology Steward, she sits on the CVD Prevention Programme Board for the Mid and South Essex ICS. She is passionate about digital innovation and patient empowered approach to its care delivery. Her research interests include digital solutions used in remote monitoring to improve patient care.
Lauren Trepte
clinical trials team Leader for women’s health research, Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS FT
DS Ed Trimbee CISM
regional cyber crime unit manager, West Midlands Regional Cyber Crime Unit
Detective Sergeant Ed Trimbee CISM Sec+
Leading Regional Cyber Crime Unit for West Midlands ‘PROTECT PREPARE PREVENT’ portfolios, his team deliver Law Enforcement support across multiple sectors to help businesses and organisations be better protected and prepared for cyber-attack.
Ed is a passionate and respected Law Enforcement cyber partner of both NHS ICB’s and NHS England. He has extensive working knowledge of NHS risk landscape, mitigation and incident response.
Ed will discuss threat, current trends, supply chain assurance and provide case study examples with real world implications. He will offer some valuable takeaways around incident response actions to engage UK Law Enforcement whilst under attack [and the benefits reporting brings], and also how to initiate the free Law Enforcement support available to all NHS outlets across the UK.
Kal Turnbull
senior product manager, National Digital Platform, NHS Education for Scotland
Kal works within NHS Education for Scotland’s Technology Service on the National Digital Platform. As a product manager, his focus is on the NDP’s data storage and brokerage services. Previously, Kal worked as a PM at a company building digital tools for psychotherapists, and before that, he founded a startup to build a platform for productive debate.
Elaine Tustian
deputy CNIO, Oxford University Hospitals NHS FT
Elaine is a registered nurse and has worked as a Digital Nursing Lead since 2017, initially part time but full time since 2019. Before this, Elaine was the Trust lead nurse for Enhanced Recovery After Surgery. As Deputy CNIO, she is responsible for facilitating digital transformation to improve patient care and providing clinical knowledge and expertise when technical digital solutions are being developed and implemented.
Dr Mala Ubhi
clinical advisor, Transformation Directorate NHS England and clinical digital lead and clinical lead for mental health, learning disability, autism, and inequalities, NHS Gloucestershire
Mala is an NHS clinical leader with multilevel insights from her local, regional, and national roles. Mala is a longstanding GP Partner in Cheltenham and a Fellow of the Royal College of General Practitioners; Gloucestershire’s Integrated Care System Clinical Digital Lead and Clinical Lead for Learning Disabilities, Autism, Mental Health, and Inequalities; and Clinical Advisor for NHSE.
Mala’s passions centre on neuroinclusive approaches, coproduction, user-centred design, and the human beings at the heart of services.
Mala is also an NHS Digital Academy alumnus and completed independent research around the NHS App, contributing to a Master’s in Digital Health Leadership.
Daniela Valdes
assistant director of digital transformation and innovation, Buckinghamshire Healthcare Trust
Daniela juggles a portfolio career spanning executive leadership, Health-tech entrepreneurship and an part-time Computer Science PhD on Artificial Intelligence. Daniela’s work at Bucks NHS Trust focuses on providing a strategic view of a multi-million IT capital portfolio, seeking to ensure the right combination of teams, systems and processes to digitise healthcare. With a career spanning C-suite level roles, Ex-Deloitte, Ex-World Bank, Daniela helps boards use data insights, AI and technology, rooting change in kindness to bring together hearts and minds when undertaking digital transformation.
Juliette van Wessem
head of programmes, digital health leadership, Institute of Global Health Innovation, Imperial College London
Juliette van Wessem works as the Head of the Digital Health Leadership programmes at the Institute of Global Health Innovation (IGHI) at Imperial College London. IGHIs portfolio of educational programmes includes the PG Diploma in Digital Health Leadership (NHS Digital Academy) and PG Certificate in Digital Health Leadership for Digital Maternity Leaders, both commissioned by NHS England. She oversees academic and operational teams and has overall responsibility of the participant experience, curriculum development and stakeholder engagement.
An experienced Programme Manager, Juliette has worked in Higher Education for over 10 years, previously for Imperial College Business School where she was responsible for the delivery of the school’s portfolio of residential and online MBA programmes. Her focus has been on finding meaningful connections between learning outcomes and faculty interests in order to translate these into engaging learning experiences for students. She has always supported programmes for professional learners, and leadership has been a key area of interest throughout her time at the College.
Dr Johan Waktare
consultant cardiologist and electrophysiologist and associate CCIO, Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital NHS FT
Dr Johan Waktare is a senior tertiary centre Consultant Cardiologist and Cardiac Electrophysiologist at Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital, and has extensive experience in Healthcare IT. He was Clinical Lead and then CCIO for his Trust and lead in the highly successful implementation of EPR at LHCH in 2013, transforming that organisation into a virtually paper free organisation overnight. He has worked on a range of other Healthcare IT, including developing in-house systems, and acting on advisory boards for industry, the CCIO Advisory Board and the HFMA. He has held a range of managerial roles including Caldicott Guardian and Service Line Lead.
Ben Wanless
consultant physiotherapist, St George’s University NHS FT
Ben leads the award winning MSK team at St George’s University Hospital NHS Trust in his role as Consultant Physiotherapist. Ben is an active researcher, educator and implementer in the digital MSK space, and has won multiple awards for his work in this area.
Over the years he has held various positions providing expert opinion and advice to organisations such as NICE, NHS England and South West London Integrated Care System. He is an alumni of the Digital Health.London Fellowship where he won the impact award for his project. He is working towards a PhD focusing on the acceptability of self-management interventions for MSK conditions.
Dr Michael Watts
associate CCIO University Hospitals of Derby and Burton NHS FT and managing director, Blüm Health
On a mission to break down the barriers to innovation within the global digital health industry, Michael is an NHS doctor, NHS Innovation Accelerator Fellow and MBA Graduate by background. Over the last few years he has been the Co-founder and Managing director of Blüm Health Ltd, an industry-disrupting digital health organisation that collaboratively works with NHS trusts, Universities and SMEs to design, build, and scale digital health software solutions, in the hope to empower solo entrepreneurs to turn their ideas into a reality whilst also enabling large, rigid institutions to unlock their innovation potential.
Alongside the Blüm Team, his focus is to build NHS-ready software and get it right first time. This means building solutions that are regulatory compliant, patient-centric, and accessible from the outset, and this model has seen the successful implementation of seven solutions across the public and private sector in just three years. Michael also supports SMEs planning to internationalise early, with Blüm being on the Department for Business and Trades ‘Go Global’ Showcase.
James Welch
software architect, University of Oxford
James Welch is a researcher and software architect at the University of Oxford, working in the Big Data Institute. He is part of the team building the Thames Valley Secure Data Environment, and also leads development on Mauro Data Mapper – an open source platform for working with data models and transformations. He has been involved in a number of national and international software automation projects, data semantics and interoperability, including the National Data Dictionary.
Tom Whicher
CEO and founder, DrDoctor
Tom Whicher is CEO of DrDoctor and an NHS Innovation Fellow, where he works with the National Innovation Accelerator (NIA) to advance the adoption of evidence-based healthcare innovation.
Passionate about using technology to create sustainable healthcare systems, Tom delivered one of the first patient portals in the NHS in 2012 and has worked to put technology in the hands of patients ever since. He’s written on health tech for The Guardian, and been featured in The Independent, Sky News, LBC, CNBC, and across the health trade press.
Dan Whiston
transformation director, Dedalus
Throughout my career I have worked in the NHS and in a commercial environment primarily focused on the delivery of both Project and Programme outcomes, as well as the execution of specific services. I am passionate about the role that IT innovation and excellence can play in the transformation of healthcare organisations.
My experience grew from technical roles, which provided me with a firm technical background with a great exposure to all care settings through to a management and delivery focus, where I have set up and managed teams of great diversity and specialism, ranging from Integration Specialists to Clinical Transformation consultants.
My current role is Transformation Director for Dedalus’ UK and Ireland business. In a previous role I was Director of Transformation and Director of IT for University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust where I was responsible for the development of the Trust’s transformation strategy and delivery of their transformation and improvement programme, working with other partners within the broader health and care economy to align services to support better joined up working.
I am married with two children and in my spare time I can usually be found at the gym or watching/participating in any number of sports.
Peter White
chief nursing information officer, Alder Hey Children’s Hospital NHS FT
Peter is Alder Hey NHS Foundation Trust’s first CNIO; a senior nurse working with the clinical, iDigital and Innovation teams. Having close working relationship with clinical staff to ensure they have access to the best digital solutions, Peter is transforming the way nurses deliver care for children and young people. Peter takes an active lead on nursing informatics, utilising data to improve patient care, safety and experience. Peter is the chair for the UK Meditech User Group as well as an active member of the North West Digital Nurse, AHP and Midwifery Network. As the first specialist hospital in Europe to achieve HIMSS Stage 7, Alder Hey is at the forefront of digital innovation and implementation.
Louise Williams
deputy chief digital information officer, Sussex Community NHS FT
Louise Williams is the Deputy Chief Digital Information Officer for Sussex Community Foundation Trust (SCFT). SCFT is a large Community Trust in the South-East of England which has received Digital Aspirant funding over the past few years to support an innovative, digital transformation programme supporting their workforce in delivering care in patient’s homes. Louise has twenty years’ experience working across various NHS digital system and EPR implementations and is a graduate of cohort three of the NHS Digital Academy.
Dr Ruth Williamson
chief medical officer, Hampshire Hospitals, NHS FT
She is a board member of Wessex AHSN. She is committed to partnership working and is a clinical lead for the Wessex Imaging Network and for the Community Diagnostics Centres programme in Dorset bringing diagnostics closer to people’s homes and tackling inequalities in healthcare.
DR Wai Keong Wong
director of digital and consultant Haematologist, Cambridge University Hospitals NHS FT
Dr Wai Keong Wong is a Consultant Haematologist and Chief Research Information Officer at UCLH. He is responsible for digital aspects of running clinical trials, making available routinely collected clinical data for research and identifying opportunities for innovation using EHRs as a form of health intervention. He is the co-founder of the Interoperability Education Summit and was the inaugural chair of the CCIO leaders network. He was a member of highly influential the ‘Wachter’ review into the state of NHS digitisation in secondary care. More recently, he is exploring the world of data science research in areas of machine learning in transfusion and natural language processing.
Dr Gang Xu
deputy medical director and consultant nephrologist, University Hospitals of Leicester NHS FT
Gang is a clinical Nephrologist and Deputy Medical Director at University Hospitals of Leicester, one of the largest acute care trust in England. His passion is helping to realise the potential benefit digitalisation can bring to patient care in the NHS. His worked on deploying a new ePMA system at the trust with NerveCentre, as well as working with NHSX and Roke, a UK based Ai company to help develop new clinical decision tool to identify deteriorating patients.
Mariatu Yunusa
deputy informatics officer, Barking Havering Redbridge Hospitals Trust
Maria is a midwife with over 8 years experience. She also holds a BSc in Computer Science and effectively merges both disciplines in her current role within the Office of Clinical Informatics.
Currently working as the Deputy Informatics Officer for the Women and Child Health Division, Maria leads the Electronic Patient Record (EPR) project, aiming to enhance the quality and safety of maternity care. In a previous role as Clinical Informatics Lead for Midwifery, Maria focused on innovative care improvements, including the ongoing audio-to-text documentation and the e-Check sustainability projects.
Maria’s dedication to sustainability has led to the development of the e-Checks project, which aims to digitise the Trust’s paper-based processes, enhancing efficiency and reducing waste. Maria aspires to continue integrating expertise in midwifery and clinical informatics to drive positive change in patient care and contribute to a greener and sustainable NHS.