Judges

Christine Connelly

Director General for Informatics, Department of Health

Christine is the first Director General for Informatics/Chief Information Officer for Health and will focus on developing and delivering the Department's overall information strategy and integrating leadership across the NHS. She took up the post in September 2008.

Christine was CIO at Cadbury Schweppes from May 2004 to September 2007.

Prior to joining Cadbury Schweppes, Christine worked in various global roles at BP. Her career included the senior IT position for both the Exploration & Production and Refining & Marketing businesses as well as leadership roles in Business Simplification, Technology, Innovation, Internal Audit and General Management. Her last position in the company was as Chief of Staff for the Gas, Power & Renewables business.

Christine was born in Scotland and has a degree in Computer Science from Aberdeen University.

Brian Derry, Chair

ASSIST National Council

Brian was appointed executive director of Information Services at the NHS Information Centre for health and social care in November 2008. Before this, he had a short secondment to NHS Connecting for Health in summer 2008, to lead the initial implementation of the Health Informatics Review. Previously, he worked at the Department of Health with secondments to Leeds Health Authority and Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust (LTHT). He was appointed director of informatics at LTHT in 2005 and a board member in 2007. Brian was elected BCS-ASSIST National Council Chair in 2007. He began his career as a government statistician.

Carla Morgan

RiO Programme Manager, NHS Waltham Forest

Carla has worked within e-health in London for 14 years. Her career started at Enfield Community & Mental Health Trust, initially on a work placement as part of her BA in Business Studies, supporting the delivery of information systems via training, user support and implementation roles. After four years at Enfield, Carla then moved to Whipps Cross Hospital where she supported ICT developments within diagnostic services before moving into CRS focused project and programme management roles.

In 2007 Carla moved to Waltham Forest PCT and managed the deployment of RiO v4 to adult's services that were previously paper based. In 2008 Waltham Forest was the first trust to upgrade from RiO v4 to v5 and formally go-live and moved from the Interim Child Health Application to RiO. Carla's team of 9 is service focussed and includes senior nurses and trainers who have been talent spotted from clinical teams and therefore have lived the challenges of clinical staff; this inclusive team approach was also extended to their BT & LPfIT colleagues ? which was the winning entry in the E-Health Insider Awards 2009.

Heather Strachan

Clinical E-Health Lead, Scottish Government E-Health Directorate

Heather Strachan has over 20 years experience in e-health. Heather, who is a nurse by background, has held a variety of posts, which include clinical e-health Lead for the Scottish Government and senior management positions in a range of areas including healthcare governance, quality improvement and research. Heather has a Masters in Information Science from London's City University. She is a fellow of the British Computer Society and a member of the Centre for Health Informatics Research and Development. Heather is a senior officer of the International Medical Informatics Association and an honorary member of their Nursing Informatics Group. She has produced forty five publications and presented at many national and international conferences on the subject including e-health strategy and benefits, personal health information management systems, knowledge management, patient safety, and the history of nursing informatics.

Dr Martin Murphy M.B B.Ch. MRCGP MA (Cantab)

Clinical Director, Informing Healthcare

Martin was born and lives in Ynys Mon. He studied medicine at the Universities of Cambridge, Wales and Manchester. He had a full time medical career as a psychiatrist and a GP for 13 years. During this time he was also a postgraduate tutor and introduced clinical audit as chairman of Cheshire MAAG. Subsequently, he has also had a full time management career as a medical director of a Health Authority, director of commissioning and as a chief executive of a Health Authority.

He has a lifelong interest in large scale clinical and process change in healthcare. This led him to work full time as director of IM&T across a hospital trust and two Primary Care Trusts for three years and on to director of health information and knowledge for the whole of the NHS at the Information Authority.

He joined the Informing Healthcare programme in 2005 as clinical director to support the delivery of improved health services across Wales. He is responsible for the overall design of the new clinical and healthcare information services which are supporting the transformation of care. He chairs the National Architecture Board and is responsible for all the governance processes required to deliver the information services.

Peter Smith

Programme Director, BT Local Service Provider Programme

Peter is responsible for the overall delivery of BT Health's LSP programme. He joined BT in 2007 from Capgemini, where he was responsible for delivering large-scale systems integration and services programmes.

"My career has been built on excellence in programme management," says Peter, who for the past 20 years has delivered complex systems integration and out-sourcing programmes in both Europe and the USA.

Speaking of his current role in BT Peter says: "You could go through your whole life and never get to work on a programme of this size. Not only in terms of the technical scale but also the huge potential to transform healthcare and literally change the lives of people for the better."

Linda Davidson

Co-founder and Director, E-Health Insider

Linda is a director and co-founder of E-Health Media Ltd, publishers of E-Health Insider and EHI Primary Care. A healthcare journalist, and editor, Linda is a former editor of Nursing Times and editorial director of Health Service Journal.

Jon Hoeksma

Editor and Director, E-Health Insider

An editor and journalist with 10 years experience of the healthcare sector. Jon is a former editor of Health Manager Today, and reported on health IT issues for a variety of publications including Computer Weekly, the Health Service Journal, Reuters Health and British Journal of Healthcare Management. Before entering journalism Jon was an NHS graduate trainee working in Southampton, chiefly in primary care. He graduated from the University of Warwick in 1991.

Lyn Whitfield

Managing Editor, E-Health Insider

Lyn is a graduate of Oxford University and the London School of Economics, from which she holds an MSc in public policy and planning. She has been a journalist for more than a decade. Lyn started her journalism career on local newspapers, but went on to develop an interest in the public sector and technology. She joined E-Health Insider as managing editor in 2008, after five years as a freelance writer, editor and project manager working for health service organisations and think-tanks as well as newspapers and magazines.