Will Smart
Global Director External Relations
Will is Global Director of External Relations for Dedalus Group. Prior to joining Dedalus, Will was Chief Information Officer for Health and Social
Care in England. A joint appointment between the Department for Health and Social Care, NHS England and NHS Improvement, Will was accountable for:
- providing advice to Secretary of State for Health and Social Care in relation to digital Initiatives across Health and Social Care;
- developing and delivering national strategies on information, technology and informatics;
- ensuring that appropriate leadership, incentives and policy levers were available to support local health and care systems to digitally enable their planning, commissioning and care delivery; and
- leading the delivery, governance and assurance of all programmes of work within the £4.7 Billion national technology programme.
As part of this programme, Will was the Senior Responsible Officer for the Global Digital Exemplar (GDE) programme, which aims to significantly increase the digital maturity of secondary care organisations through supporting exemplar organisations achieve globally excellent levels of maturity, ‘blueprinting’ their deployments and scaling through ‘fast follower’ partnerships.
He was also responsible for defining England’s approach to creating national longitudinal records for all citizens through the creation of federated Local Health and Care Records. He led the creation of five exemplar regional LHCRs that together cover around 40% of the population in England. The programmes are delivered at a local level that retains people’s trust and confidence in the safe use of their data whilst enabling the economies of scale associated with doing things once in a single region.
Will has also served as CIO at the Royal Free London Hospitals Group, and has extensive experience in healthcare technology, as well as consulting widely across the UK Public sector in the areas of digital strategy and transformation, service management and outsourcing.