The role of the IT leader is ‘pretty basic’: eHealth Queensland CEO

The role of IT leaders is still a “pretty basic one” that involves constantly listening, eHealth Queensland CEO Damian Green said during a panel discussion at this year’s Gartner IT Symposium at the Gold Coast.

If you are a good listener, you’ll probably work to create really good solutions, he told the audience.

To support clinicians and consumers, IT people also need to transform into digital business enablers. Working and focusing on the people, be those patients, families or carers, is the key to deliver healthcare services and achieve better results, Green said.

One way of achieving this, he says, is understanding that a conversation about digital transformation in healthcare cannot exist without a strategy conversation.

“What’s the business trying to achieve? What are the opportunities to improve the experience of our users of the healthcare system? And what are the opportunities to radically improve efficiency, in terms of the way we work? And that’s not an IT conversation that’s a business conversation,” Green explained.

Also, keeping the patient at the centre of the conversation is what will ‘radically’ improve healthcare.

To provide care for patients, eHealth Queensland works with clinicians, other department divisions and leaders in other parts of the healthcare sector. And that is where Green sees the opportunity for the health sector, to create an “ecosystem” of collaboration that will result in better outcomes for patients.

“And the role of leaders like myself and the role of eHealth Queensland is to engage with those partners and ensure that we’re providing the digital platforms that enable some of those ideas, some of those models of care that our clinicians are building through those partnerships. And I think it’s less about point solutions and more about assisting those clinical teams by providing platforms, so that they can build on,” Green added.

Green was recently appointed to the role of CIO at Queensland Healthalso stepping intothe role of CEO at eHealth Queensland, replacing Dr Richard Ashby who resigned earlier this year following allegations of an undeclared relationship involving an individual linked to thereplacement of the state’s patient administration system (PAS).

@Samira_Sarraf

Samira Sarraf attended Gartner IT Symposium as a guest of Gartner.