Meet the Team

1. What does being Chief Operating Officer at HDRS mean on a day-to-day basis? 

What I love about the COO role is the variety. One minute I’m thinking about very practical things like our offices, technology or how our core services will operate; the next I’m working with the Executive Leadership Team on strategy and how we turn that into a deliverable roadmap. 

Because we’re building HDRS, every strategic and practical decision we make really matters. From the technology we choose, to the environment we provide, to the way we work, every choice shapes our culture and our ability to recruit brilliant people and build high-performing teams. They all contribute to our ability to be successful.  

That combination of the operational and the strategic, and the chance to build something with the level of ambition that HDRS has, is what makes the role so exciting. 

2. What does turning an ambitious long-term vision into a clear and achievable plan for HDRS look like? 

My experience at Genomics England and NHSX has shown me the huge potential of health data and how difficult some of these challenges are to address. Secure, responsible access to data with a good user experience has been a longstanding problem. HDRS gives us the opportunity to tackle that in a much more joined-up way and at a scale that could have global impact on a population even greater than the United Kingdom’s. 

The key is never losing sight of the long-term ambition. When you’re building something at pace, it’s very easy to jump at the next thing that comes along. We have to keep asking: does this decision help deliver for patients and build the company we want HDRS to be? 

The vision for HDRS is a much more cohesive journey for the use of health data, from access and analytics through to public involvement and engagement, creating real value from data responsibly.  

This means the long and short term should never be in tension, the short-term moves contribute to the long-term vision for our services. We need to get things like technology, intellectual property, contracting, funding flows, and our operating model right now, while making sure they work at much greater scale in the future. We don’t want to cut corners or build what we then must unpick later. 

That’s where a clear roadmap to the future matters, noting that every roadmap takes turns along the way. But it’s also about people. If everyone understands the strategic goal and how we’re measuring success, people throughout HDRS should feel able to make good decisions and unlock things themselves. 

For me, pace comes from having brilliant people and creating an environment where they can thrive and do their best work. 

3. How do you create the conditions for HDRS to live up to its ambition at speed? 

The first thing is recognising that you can’t achieve this by simply building one great organisation. It’s a team sport. 

HDRS sits in a much bigger ecosystem across the NHS, government, research, industry, charities, patient advocates and the public, and sits alongside wider changes across health and life sciences. We need strong relationships across all those areas and a genuine understanding of where people are coming from. 

We also need the right capabilities inside HDRS, whether that’s commercial, technology, engagement or communications, and we need to be confident about telling our story. 

Trust is fundamental. We need to prove that we’re trustworthy through the responsible use of data, but also through how we show up: listening properly, being transparent and being collaborative.  

I also don’t think governance and pace are opposites when done well. A strong Board, clear accountabilities, good risk management and the right controls create confidence and allow people to move quickly and at pace. It is about ensuring we have the rigour we need without creating unnecessary bureaucracy; too often the system gets this balance wrong. 

If we can combine that with a strong, compassionate and ambitious culture, we create the conditions to move at real pace, with all the right permissions in place. 

4. What is the importance of HDRS’s relationships with partners and stakeholders? 

Partnerships aren’t an add-on to our mission. They’re how we achieve it. 

No single organisation can unlock the full potential of health data on its own. We need the NHS, researchers, government, regulators, industry, charities, patients and the public working together. 

Strong partnerships mean we can identify the challenges we share and, where possible, solve them once rather than everybody tackling the same problem separately. They can also help us create a much more joined-up journey, from accessing data and carrying out research to running clinical trials and ultimately getting new treatments and innovations to patients. 

But none of that happens without trust, particularly with patients and the public. We need to listen actively, understand concerns and be transparent about what we’re doing, why we’re doing it and what difference it could make. Patients are our north star. But they’re not just who we’re building this for, they are inherently part of how we build. 

For me, trust isn’t something we can simply say we have. We have to earn it through our actions, and keep earning it as HDRS grows and evolves.

5. What would you like to see HDRS making possible for patients and the health and care system? 

For me, there’s a human being at the heart of all of this. 

I want more patients to have access to clinical trials, better diagnoses, and new treatments. For someone living with a rare disease, research might finally provide an answer where previously there wasn’t one. For someone else, their data might contribute to a discovery that helps people they’ll never meet. 

I’d love people to be able to say: “I’m proud of how my data has been used. It might not have helped me directly, but it helped somebody else.” 

And for the health system, I want clinicians to have better tools to help their patients, whether that’s new diagnostics, AI-enabled technologies, better treatments or more personalised medicine. Research is how we make many of those things possible. 

HDRS isn’t a frontline organisation, but we can enable the people who are. If researchers can access data responsibly, more clinical trials can happen here, regulators can have better evidence, and promising innovations can move into the clinic faster. 

That creates a virtuous cycle: better data enables better research; better research leads to better treatments and diagnostics; success attracts more research and investment; and ultimately patients benefit. 

That’s the impact for me: turning the potential of health data into something tangible for patients.