Clinical informatics, built from the inside out.

From surgery to clinical AI

I trained as an ENT surgeon at the Northern Deanery, then left at ST4 because I kept being more interested in how patient data moved around the hospital than in the operations themselves. An MSc in Health Informatics at UCL gave that instinct a structure.

Since 2011, I have worked at the boundary between clinical practice and digital systems. As programme lead at the NHS Digital Academy, I worked directly with the CIOs and CCIOs building the modern NHS. Five years as an Executive Health Consultant at Atos took me across national NHS digital programmes: the New Hospital Programme, Shared Care Record, Blueprinting strategy, and the EPR Excellence Project for cardiovascular disease. Alongside that, I ran independent advisory work with UK health-tech startups including Virtue Health, Trustwise AI, Careful Online, and Appt Health.

Recruiters did not know what to do with me for most of that decade. Roles and titles are only objectively meaningful if they are well known. I eventually stopped trying to find a title that fitted and focused instead on what I had built and what I genuinely enjoyed doing. AI is the lane.

A year inside an AI-first team

Most recently I spent a year as Clinical AI Systems Lead at a voice-native AI startup deploying inside the NHS. I went in with one goal: immerse myself in a genuinely AI-first product team and build hands-on skills at a depth I could not get any other way.

I spent the year writing prompts, designing agentic workflows, running iterative testing, and sitting inside engineering and product daily. As a non-coder, I was given access to the tools and pushed well outside my comfort zone, and I found I genuinely enjoyed the work: taking a wicked problem at the edge of AI and healthcare, designing a solution, testing it, learning, and moving on.

That year settled something I had been circling for a long time. AI is the lane. The clinical perspective belongs in the actual build, in the workflows and the safety thinking, not in advisory memos sent from outside the room. Clinformatix is where I take that conviction and turn it outward.

The role I am defining

The work sits at five intersections that do not usually sit in one person. It is like trying to tread water in quicksand: models change, regulation shifts, use cases multiply, and the team has to ship at speed. What that needs is a clinician who is comfortable determining when a feature is safe enough to deploy, and who can think about how to safeguard the end user without delaying the release. I have started calling this role a Clinical AI Systems Architect. Whatever it ends up being called, it is the work I do.

What Clinformatix is

Clinformatix is my independent consulting practice, run through Clinformatix Ltd. I take fractional and consulting engagements with teams building and deploying clinical AI who need this skill set embedded inside the work, not advising from outside it.

Alongside the consulting, I build things to make the approach concrete: a structured hazard catalogue, clinical pathway templates, and an early concept for a tool to help draft hazard logs. These are worked examples and prototypes that show how I think, not commercial products.

The thread through all of it is the same. I would rather hand a team the clinical thinking and the artefacts they can actually build from than a strategy document that sits in a folder. If that is what you are missing, get in touch.