For much of the NHS's digital history, the Chief Information Officer occupied a role largely associated with infrastructure: keeping systems running, managing suppliers, protecting data and overseeing major technology deployments. At The Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust and Sandwell and West Birmingham NHS Trust, Ravi Kaur Sahota is helping to demonstrate how far that job has changed.

As Group Chief Information Officer, Sahota now has responsibility spanning digital, data, technology and medical engineering across a substantial healthcare footprint covering acute hospitals, community services and primary care. Her career in the NHS stretches back more than 16 years across local, regional and national roles, but it is the breadth of transformation now sitting within her portfolio that makes her particularly interesting at a point when the health service is demanding far more from its digital leaders.

Her progression at Dudley has mirrored that shift. Having joined the organisation as Director of Digital Portfolio, she subsequently became Interim Operational CIO before taking on the Group CIO position across Dudley and Sandwell and West Birmingham. Today, the remit extends well beyond conventional IT operations into digital strategy, data, innovation, investment, cyber risk, benefits realisation and the increasingly difficult task of turning new technology into measurable improvements for clinicians and patients.

From EPR to clinical transformation

One of the foundations of that work has been Dudley's electronic patient record. Rather than treating digitisation as the replacement of paper with screens, teams at the Trust have increasingly used the EPR as an infrastructure through which clinical pathways can be redesigned.

In maternity, Dudley configured its Sunrise EPR around clinical workflows, introducing alerts to prompt interventions including venous thromboembolism risk assessments and using the Modified Early Obstetric Warning Score to help identify women at risk of deterioration. Sahota described the EPR as allowing Dudley to adopt more data-backed processes, using information to identify where additional support and training were required. The locally configurable approach also meant some changes could be implemented within 24 hours rather than waiting months for supplier-led development.

That philosophy extended into one of Dudley's more significant patient-safety programmes. Sahota was among the authors of a published evaluation of the Trust's digital deteriorating patient pathway, which incorporated vital signs and an algorithm into the EPR to trigger escalation and senior clinical review.

The pathway activates for an average of 43 patients each day. Its evaluation reported significant improvements in escalation and senior review, alongside increased use of treatment escalation plans, with the authors describing a wider cultural shift in how the organisation responds to deteriorating patients. It is a useful example of digital transformation becoming embedded directly into the mechanics of clinical care rather than sitting alongside it.

An 80% reduction in documentation time

More recently, Sahota's work has moved decisively into artificial intelligence. Dudley's experimentation with ambient voice technology began in Same Day Emergency Care and rheumatology, targeting one of healthcare's most persistent productivity problems: the amount of clinical time consumed by documentation.

The results were substantial. Dudley reported an 80% reduction in documentation time in SDEC, while a six-month backlog of rheumatology letters was reduced to 14 days. The significance of the work, however, lies in what happened afterwards.

Rather than allowing a successful pilot to remain isolated within one organisation, Dudley developed the clinical safety case, business case and evidence base required for wider adoption. That work helped inform an NHS Midlands procurement framework designed to make ambient clinical documentation technology available across the region, with potential coverage of approximately 70,000 clinicians.

It reveals something important about Sahota's approach to digital transformation. Her public discussions of AI repeatedly return to integration, clinical safety, governance, regulation, benefits realisation and sustainability. The technology itself matters, but the harder question is how an NHS organisation moves from an interesting pilot to something clinicians trust, infrastructure can support and the health service can scale.

Building the digital workforce

Sahota has also increasingly focused on the capability required behind the technology. Her current responsibilities include the development of digital, data and technology services across the group, while she has participated in work examining how data and AI academies can build skills from board level through to frontline teams. Her broader career includes electronic health record implementation, digital access initiatives, workforce transformation and complex organisational change.

That matters because the NHS's next digital challenge is unlikely to be solved by procuring more technology alone. AI, shared care records, automation and advanced analytics require organisations capable of redesigning workflows around them, understanding their risks and measuring whether they actually improve care.

Sahota's growing influence within this agenda was recognised in 2026 when she was named Outstanding Leader of the Year at The Dudley Group's Committed to Excellence Awards. It followed a period in which Dudley's digital teams have also received national recognition for projects designed around frontline clinical and diagnostic challenges.

Her trajectory therefore reflects something larger happening inside the NHS. The CIO is moving closer to the centre of operational and clinical strategy, responsible for connecting technology decisions with workforce productivity, patient safety and organisational performance.

Sahota's record at Dudley provides an increasingly compelling case study of what that can look like in practice. From EPR-enabled deterioration pathways to AI documentation capable of returning time to clinicians, the common thread is implementation: identifying a real healthcare problem, building technology around the people dealing with it and establishing evidence that the intervention has made a difference.

As the NHS enters a period in which AI, integrated data and digital productivity will increasingly shape how care is delivered, leaders capable of making that transition from technology to measurable impact will become considerably more important. Sahota is already showing what that transition looks like.