Role Models:
Joanna Smith

Joanna is an accomplished international CIO. Having started her career in Pharmaceuticals, in HR then Sales & Marketing, she moved into IT in the mid 80’s and subsequently led large global programs alongside delivering IT services in Europe and Asia. In more recent years she moved into Healthcare and was CIO at the Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Foundation Trust where she successfully delivered a large transformation program including the complete overall and replacement of their IT infrastructure and the introduction of a number of new major clinical applications and the digitisation of their paper patient records. She is a strong advocate for and was an early adopter of cloud technologies. In 2018 she joined Sidra, Qatar, as CIO and delivered a major restructure of their IT organisation and the upgrade of their electronic patient record solution. Since her return to the UK she has been providing consulting and advisory services to Life Sciences and Healthcare organisations including interim CIO at Great Ormond Street Hospital and interim Group Chief Informatics Officer at Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust, where she played a key leadership role in their Epic EPR programme and led the development of their new Digital and Data strategies. More recently she was interim CTIO at StepChange, the UK’s leading debt charity where she drove the transformation of their change process, and is currently supporting the transition to their new CTIO. She has just taken on the interim CIO role for University Hospital Sussex NHS Foundation Trust, the 5th largest Trust in the country, and is also Digital Advisory Lead at Lexica, a multi-disciplinary specialist Healthcare and Life Sciences consultancy, and a member of the Ideal Health Advisory Board, a specialist digital healthcare consultancy.