Stephen East

Stephen East

Please note this page was last updated in 2019. Visit Stephen’s LinkedIn profile for more information.


Stephen started his career in the NHS 12 years ago as Systems Architect at a large teaching hospital in London. He has subsequently worked in a number of health and care service transformation and redesign roles with a focus on technical development and change. All roles have centred on joint / partnership working and integration.

Stephen was a finalist for the 2020 Digital Pioneer Fellowship Empower Award 

Read Stephen’s blog where he explains why he has re-branded himself as the “digital plumber.” 


Digital Pioneer Fellowship project: The Cerner HealtheIntent platform

Problem: 

  • Working collectively towards a professionally led service transformation
  • To integrate and join up physical and mental health and social care
  • A focus on health and care prevention and proactive management, including better self care
  • Shifting care from hospital to community settings; care closer to home
  • Reducing unwarranted variance in care for citizens.

Solution: The implementation of the Cerner HealtheIntent platform:

  • Helps professionals to proactively manage people’s care, identify any gaps in services and improve outcomes
  • Supports a population based approach, for example an ability to identify and assess the needs of all people with diabetes
  • Displays key clinical and care indicators and best practice measures at a glance
  • Provides a tool which will help professionals to analyse health and care challenges and problems and generate evidence based answers
  • Can display information in a number of customisable formats such as predictive data models, heat and activity maps and tables
  • Allows professionals to upload additional information and data sets which will help their work and analysis.

Scale of project: 370k citizens, 38 GP Practices, Lewisham & Greenwich NHS Trust – Acute & Community Services, SLAM, Lewisham Local Authority (Social Care, Housing etc.)

Desired impact: 

  • Ability to understand the Population Health and Care needs of Lewisham
  • Better continuity and transfer of care between services
  • Improved quality, safety and speed of care delivery and decision making across Lewisham and south east London
  • An ability to make better evidence-based decisions / design due to having a more complete care picture available to professionals
  • Ability to identify care gaps across a population and put them in front of clinicians and professionals
  • Reduced waste, duplication and costs in direct care delivery and by better design

Progress to date: In the time that Stephen has been on the Fellowship programme he has got the platform signed-off as clinically assured as well as getting the acute, community, mental health and primary care data onto the platform. Stephen has developed a high-functioning analytics group and changed the focus to have the analytics driving the transformation. He is still 6 months behind where he feels they need to be, but he has developed a much better approach to align with their stakeholders, and has refined which pathways they are working on. Stephen says they are now operating in a more dynamic and agile way.


“I was eager to get more exposure and build my profile. The Fellowship programme seemed to align with these requirements without being overly intensive.

I got most value from the programme from my interactions with one of the mentors. He helped me take a step back and do an audit of the project. I found discussions with the other Fellows helpful. For example, one of them introduced me to relevant people throughout South East London. The programme gave me access to senior registrars and consultants.

The programme has helped me in terms of exposure. There was a lot of positive feedback from the blog that I wrote and had published on the DigitalHealth.London website. This, I believe, influenced invitations to speak at conferences in Kansas, Netherlands, Belgium and Australia. I have been seconded to the STP as an advisory body member to support the One London Programme. This has given my Trust greater visibility. The programme has helped me develop confidence in decision-making and engagement as well as to be able to drive better adoption. Having the opportunity to hear about common challenges that other fellows faced enabled me to reflect on my own.

When I first started the Fellowship programme, I did not feel confident in my ability to make an impact. This has vastly improved over the last few months. Previously, stakeholders would have only reached out to me via the Exec, but now I am being approached directly to help navigate the digital health space and to share knowledge. I feel more able to advise, and I have developed closer relationships with the senior exec at the Trust and the Local Authority.” – Stephen East