2018 Digital Health Award Winner Profile: Andy Kinnear
https://www.digitalhealth.net/2018/09/award-winner-andy-kinnear/
“I think that digital has become so critical to healthcare that the people who are in charge of it need to be proven, competent, invested-in individuals with the necessary skills, but also maintaining a level of accreditation to fulfil that function.”
He’s spent a lot of time trying to create such a setup, and it is those efforts which his peers voted to recognise with the Digital Health Award. As chair of BCS Health for instance, Kinnear has been integral to the foundation of the Federation for Informatics Professionals. It’s an organisation he sees as crucial to professionalisation.
“If you look at the way other professions have become mature and have successfully developed, one of the things they’ve done is they’ve had active and vibrant professional bodies,” he argues.
“And so my work with the BCS [The Chartered Institute for IT] and then colleagues in Socitm and in CILIP [Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals] and in IHRIM [The Institute of Health Records and Information Management] with the medical records managers and now with AphA [Association of Professional Healthcare Analysts], collectively to create the Federation of Informatics Professionals has been one of the jigsaw pieces to create a profession.”