Yat Wah Li

At the beginning of my fellowship...

I have a long and ongoing personal and professional interest in technology, IT and their application to healthcare and medical education. The opportunity to have dedicated time outside of clinical commitments allowed me to:

• further develop, be trained and be supported in my knowledge, skills and experience in order to deliver the digital revolution
• to raise the profile of digital clinicians within the health service.

The objectives at the start of the fellowship were to explore:

• Transformative improvement to information governance
• Alignment with the trust’s digital strategy of paperless working
• Centralisation to improve governance and monitoring
• The ability to perform analytics to support key lines of inquiry
• The technological and economic impact of BYOD and mobile working
• Develop digital skills to empower the workforce
• Alignment with the NHS Long Term Plan of:
  • Empowering people
  • Supporting health and care professionals
  • Supporting clinical care
  • Improving population health
  • Improving clinical efficiency and safety

During my fellowship...

Sustainable trust-wide digital platform for clinical audit

• Member of a team driving specification, procurement and implementation for cloud-based platform across clinical audit, CQI and governance
• Evolving the digital first strategy with audit platform
• Increasing engagement with data and information from board to ward and ward to board to enable improvement
• Driving an interactive executive level nursing quality dashboard that is platform agnostic

Digital transformation of the critical care outreach service

• Digital enabled and evolved the team to improve the service
• Drove real-time data collection and analytics to improve care
• Shortlisted in the HSJ award 2020 category for driving efficiency through technology
• Commended in Health IT Award category of Health Business Awards 2020

Coronavirus digital projects

• Rapid dashboard development and deployment for public health, in-patient and critical care for real-time monitoring of patients with coronavirus that has been in use since mid-April 2020 enabling strategic planning
• Set up and clinically led the trust’s COVID-19 Hospitalisation in England Surveillance System (CHESS) to support reporting to PHE, NHSE and Midlands critical care network which has been continually operational since 4th April 2020 and recognised as part of the trust’s Fab change and #NoGoingBack campaign
• Lobbied for and supported the development and evolution of Midlands critical care dashboard system which went live June 2020
• Provided timely early local analytics of critical care patients in comparison with evolving national critical care figures to examine clinical outcome and appraise clinical management strategies
• Implemented critical care IT infrastructure to improve patient care and support:
  • Remote observation monitoring station
  • Video-enabled communication devices
  • Building the case for multiple laptops and remote access for anaesthetics
• Development of dashboard to monitor oxygen utilisation across the organisation

New leadership roles

• Acting Deputy CCIO
• Chair of electronic observations group

Lessons learned:

• Digital can be a lonely place. Colleagues may not understand, appreciate or support the longer term and wider value of the digital change; and they may not appreciate the impacts and consequences of when digital change has not been implemented properly.
• It is vital to look beyond the problem directly in front. An understanding of the wider problem enables implementation of the right solutions and an appreciation and minimisation of unintended consequences.
• Barriers and hindrerances are opportunities to re-examine the vision and direction. These provide pause for thought and time for re-evaluation of the strategy that may lead to avoidance of costly mistakes or towards a positive change of direction.