In our organisation we are now two and a half months in to the rollout of our ‘Paperlite’ programme under the Global Digital Exemplar Programme body of work. From this we have moved a huge swathe of our paper-based processes on to the computer (It’s a start!) and have started to practise like we have a true Electronic Health Record. As I was told at the start of my Informatics journey by my then CCIO, Dr Rob Allcock: “All improvement requires change, but not all change is improvement”.

My name is Matthew, and I am a Doctor – a Dermatologist to be exact. Or at least that was true until more recently. I suppose I identify now as more ‘bi-professional’ or ‘It’s complicated’. It has become complicated by trying to build my niche in Clinical Informatics, alongside my training as a Dermatologist.

When I started my Clinical Informatics journey a few years ago, the organisation I was in subscribed to being a ‘Lean’ organisation and my first indoctrination was by reading ‘The Toyota Way’ by Jeffrey K. Liker. I immediately sped through reading it all and was so happy to have found a common language to be able to explain why I thought a system and a process was wrong, and how one might go about fixing it.