Ricky Richardson: paediatrician who pioneered the development of medical records and helped set up charity Whizz Kidz

Electronic medical records (EMR) have transformed healthcare in the past two decades. Their introduction was pioneered by a handful of determined visionaries, led on the clinical side in the UK by the Great Ormond Street consultant paediatrician, Ricky Richardson.

Richardson was the founding chair of the UK E-health Association in 1999. He advocated strongly for the involvement of doctors—initially as a member of the UK’s National Progamme for IT, set up in 2002 by prime minister Tony Blair. The programme became one of the UK’s most expensive IT failures and was dismantled in 2011—“due, from my father’s perspective, to poor clinical engagement in the project,” said his son Sacha, an intensive care consultant in Melbourne, Australia.

At the time the medical profession commonly viewed EMR as “utterly crazy, because it took clinicians four times longer to put the data into the computer than to make a written record,” said Richard Kitney, professor of biomedical systems engineering at Imperial College London. “Ricky recognised that once patient data were in the computer they could potentially be accessed in a quarter of the time by an appropriate clinician anywhere in …