NHS England is set to begin a hunt for a new permanent Chief Information Officer after respected CIO John Quinn said he would step down in March.
Quinn took over as interim CIO in early 2023, going permanent shortly afterwards. He has held what is arguably the biggest CIO role in the public sector – running one of the largest technology estates in Europe.
The experienced public sector CIO is “prioritising a reduced working pattern and taking on greater caring responsibilities,” said the NHS’s national transformation director Vin Diwakar in a message to staff.
“The question of how the public sector can attract and retain leadership talent is an important one,” said one friend of the outgoing NHS CIO.
Quinn’s decision was met with some dismay in the sector: The softly spoken CIO has successfully built critical relationships with the NHS’s myriad stakeholders and quietly but effectively helped deliver some complex digital transformation initiatives across the healthcare service.
NHS England's CIO: Biggest success?
NHS England sets the national direction of the NHS. It also runs national IT systems and is responsible for the collection, analysis, publication, and dissemination of data generated by health and social care services.
Quinn told The Stack that “keeping the digital spirit alive” through the merger of NHS Digital into NHS England was probably his “biggest achievement but probably the least recognised and visible…”
See Quinn in conversation with Accenture's Ashish Goel in December 2024
More visibly, Quinn presided over major uptake of the NHSApp (by March 2024, 75% of the adult population in England was on the application; in April 2024 alone people viewed or changed 7.7 million secondary care appointments through the App, ordered 3.9 million repeat prescriptions and accessed 1.6 million online consultations, an annual report shows.)
Other major initiatives under Quinn’s leadership included completion of a major infrastructure transformation, with migration to the cloud of the NHS “Spine” – national IT infrastructure that joins together over 44,000 healthcare IT systems running 36 national services and holding 1.2 petabytes of data. These were previously spread across 360 servers in two UK data centres. They have since been migrated to AWS.
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(Spine allows information to be shared securely through national services such as the Electronic Prescription Service, the Personal Demographics Service, the Summary Care Record and the e-Referral Service.)
The NHS data centres previously hosting the service were decommissioned, on-time, shortly before the 2023 Christmas break.
Spine now processes two billion messages a month, whilst a modernised NHS.net connect platform supported 77 million meetings, 443 million calls and 500 million chat messages securely across the NHS last year.
Under Quinn’s stewardship NHS England invested over £500 million in more than 200 frontline projects, whilst a modernised SOC actively monitored over 1.85 million computers last year for security issues.
“John's contributions to NHS England have been invaluable. His dedication to delivering a major portfolio, and his commitment to building strong relationships with the government have been truly remarkable. We are enormously grateful for his commitment and vision. We will be conducting a search for a permanent CIO in due course. In the meantime, we will put in place interim arrangements to ensure a seamless transition” added Diwakar in a message to staff on January 6.
