We sat down with Integration and Support Engineer Debbie Mason to talk about her background in the Royal Navy, our recent neighbourhood health simulation experience and boosting women in tech.
“I think we could and should encourage more women to start a career in tech, but it needs to start much earlier in the school system – to generate that interest in our formative years.
Children are already surrounded by smart devices, but they often don’t know how those devices actually work. If we can introduce that kind of thinking early on, explaining the tech behind what they use every day it could be encouraging for them, especially for young girls who might not otherwise see themselves in tech.”
Debbie Mason, Integration and Support Engineer
Can you tell us a little bit about your history before you joined Feedback Medical?
My family has a strong military background, so I started my career in the Royal Navy. For seven years I was a communications specialist predominantly deployed on operations managing internal and external radio communications. My job there was mostly working with radio circuits, HF radios, UHF radios and sort of encrypted secret traffic – all very sneaky peaky and exciting – but I also did things like tape backups and configuring emails, so that was my introduction into working in communications and IT.
After the Navy, I went to work in the NHS in a PACS (picture archiving communication systems) team and it was there that I was first introduced to DICOM.
DICOM is digital imaging and communications in medicine – for the last 14 years I’ve been working as a system engineer in different companies supporting that DICOM element, the storage and transmission of medical imaging and any associated interoperable systems.
How does your experience translate into your role at Feedback Medical – and what does a day in your job look like?
With Feedback Medical I work with multiple teams, mostly the support and research & development teams. My role generally involves the management of support tickets within our system that are related to DICOM and imaging, as well as documentation review and the creation of technical documents that involve HL7 (a data standard for integration used throughout the NHS.)
Alongside that, I’m also involved in project management and generally providing second- and third-line support for any users with our software toolkit.
A typical day starts with resolving the trickier tickets within our system that require additional review or understanding, and then I’ll try and focus on the technical documentation or anything that I need to review, or draft any knowledge articles for fixes.
I’m involved not just in the running of technical projects but in the implementation of those projects as well – such as installing our company software or carrying out configuration changes in test environments – I work with a variety of tools across multiple customer environments. No two days are ever the same!
What would you say are the biggest challenges in terms of rolling out and integrating our product with all the different systems that the NHS uses?
I think one of the most significant challenges in integrating with and supporting NHS systems for our customers is the combination of legacy infrastructure and the variation between different NHS trust systems.
A lot of NHS systems are still running on that legacy infrastructure – which poses integration challenges, especially when modern platforms or cloud solutions need to interact with these outdated technologies.
Additionally, the NHS obviously isn’t a single entity; it’s made up of lots of trusts and bodies all potentially using different electronic health records or booking systems or data formats.
As a result, we have to adapt to each trust – a one-size-fits-all approach just doesn’t work. Interoperability and configurability, although they become key selling points, can also cause issues with being able to repeat an installation from trust to trust.
As we’re a smaller company, we can and do offer that bespoke configurability, which helps make it less of a stumbling block for us than, say, a larger company. But that’s an issue that I have found repeatedly across my career with the NHS.
The recently released 10 Year Health Plan acknowledged those complications and fractured systems, and outlined a move towards a neighbourhood health system. You were one of our team that was lucky enough to participate in the first simulation of a neighbourhood health service across London a few weeks ago.
What was your experience of that simulation and what key learnings have you taken away and into the business in the weeks since?
I’ve never participated in a technological simulation before! So that whole experience was interesting to me; learning about the difficulties that acute services are dealing with in terms of patient wait times and response times and access to care services was quite hard to hear, but I understood it.
It was interesting looking at the situation from the perspective of an enabler instead of as a patient. Our system Bleepa® was used to enable the clinicians and the participants to communicate, using it to share their patient information to provide those faster response times and signpost into the critical services that they needed in the simulation.
It was really interesting being on that side of the journey, because it really helped to demonstrate how crucial it is to understand the impact that having access to the right technology can have on patient care and then timely access to services.
We all know that when healthcare professionals can’t communicate effectively, with the appropriate services, often due to the lack of tools or other factors, it has a direct impact on the frontline care.
So that different perspective made me reflect a little bit that when I’m frustrated about not being able to get a GP appointment as a patient there might be wider technological issues at play behind the scenes.
As a company, we’re proud of the representation of women in our technological roles – but it is still not the norm in our industry – as a woman in a tech role, what are your thoughts about helping promote women to get into that space?
I think we could and should encourage more women to start a career in tech, but it needs to start much earlier in the school system – to generate that interest in our formative years.
Children are already surrounded by smart devices, but they often don’t know how those devices actually work. If we can introduce that kind of thinking early on, explaining the tech behind what they use every day it could be encouraging for them, especially for young girls who might not otherwise see themselves in tech.
There’s also still a lot of outdated stereotypes in the industry, and those can be a big barrier. I think seeing real examples matters. There are great communities and resources out there – LinkedIn groups, blogs, mentorship networks – where women share their journeys in tech. The more we highlight those stories, the more other women can see it’s possible and feel confident taking that step too.
Read the previous entries in our Staff Expertise Blog series
- A conversation with Annemijn Eschauzier, non-executive director
- A chat with Liz Theakston, Customer Success Manager
- A conversation with Richard Dulcamara, NHS Partnerships Lead