John New is the Chief Clinical Officer for NWeH, a Consultant Physician at Salford Royal Foundation Trust with interests in diabetes and obesity, the clinical lead for obesity medicine at SRFT and an honorary Senior Lecturer in Medicine at The University of Manchester.

Through his clinical work John has had an interest in the management and delivery of long term conditions provided by primary and secondary health-carers. This has included numerous health informatics projects including the recent development of the Salford Integrated Record (SIR) project. This provides clinicians within Salford real time access to the integrated medical record, containing details from primary and secondary care, of all people living within Salford. This system went live in June 2009 and is the successor to the Salford Diabetes record, which provided a similar integrated service for all people within Salford who had diabetes, which has been used since 2003.

John’s research interests have been developing better ways of providing and monitoring clinical care, frequently utilising information technology. These projects have included the development of Diabetes Care call where people with diabetes receive some of their care via a call centre staffed by non-medically trained call operatives supported by a diabetes specialist nurse. This project demonstrated the sustained improvements in patient’s diabetes control, and the positive take up of the service by both patients and health care professionals. In 2005 this system was rolled out as a tier 2 service for diabetes management within Salford and is marketed by British Telecom (BT) throughout England.

With colleagues at SRFT and the University of Manchester he has written numerous papers examining the effects of different models of care on outcomes in chronic diseases mostly focusing on diabetes and chronic kidney disease. He has been involved in developing computer assisted programs for identifying people with chronic kidney disease and prompting effective management of these people within the primary care setting. Within Salford he has developed a program for calculating peoples cardiovascular risk score thereby alerting the patient, and the general practitioner to the need for effective preventative care. The cardiovascular risk program will be among the first wave of programs offered by NWeH.