Poll reveals support for CIOs and CCIOs executive board membership

The results are in and Digital Health News can reveal that an overwhelming majority of readers are in favour of CIOS and CCIOs being executive board members.

Following a workshop at our recent Leadership Summit in Bristol last month, we launched a poll to find out whether our readers feel CIOs/CCIOs should sit on the board.

Around 100 people took part, with a staggering 94% believing that CIOs and CCIOs should be board members and have the right to vote.

Speaking at the summit, CIO Christine Walters said being an executive board member at St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust enabled her to “understand the priorities of the business and the rationale of why decisions are made”.

However, there was some CIOs who felt they were able to do this successfully without being on a board.

Darren McKenna, CIO at Northumberland, Tyne and Wear NHS Foundation Trust, argued he did not feel disconnected and would rather concentrate on the task at hand.

Digital Health News recently carried out another poll to find out which of the five priorities of national CCIO, Dr Simon Eccles, readers believed to be most important.

Of the 271 voters, half said interoperability standards should be top of the CCIO’s list, with ‘doing what we said we would do’ coming in second at 21%.

In third place was patient access to records, scoring 17% of the votes, while business and research intelligence came in fourth with 8%.