Clinical Entity and Natural Language Programming (NLP) Service Lead

At South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, we believe in providing excellent care delivered with pride and compassion. Everything we do aims to improve the lives of the people and communities we serve and promote mental health and wellbeing for all. Access to information extracted from electronic health records is essential for day-to-day clinical decision making through clinical decision support tools and for clinical research. The Clinical Entity and Natural Language Processing (NLP) Service Lead is responsible for defining and managing services that extract key clinical information from free text and structured records for use by clinical services through LUCi and for research via CRIS. In addition to managing internal services, the role includes designing and overseeing the externally facing commercial Mental Health Text Analytics Cloud (MH-TAC) service. MH-TAC enables NHS Trusts and universities to access and use NLP pipelines developed within SLaM safely and securely to extract information from local clinical text.,

• Manage the SLaM Clinical Informatics Entity and NLP Service, ensuring policies are implemented effectively.
• Manage service operations, including maintenance of an ITIL-aligned service model.
• Line manage the service's technical developer and administrator.
• Lead engagement with senior clinicians and IoPPN academics to identify information extraction needs, assess feasibility and design effective solutions.
• Lead development of pipelines to extract complex clinical entities using advanced NLP and AI techniques.
• Supervise and train staff in new information extraction processes.
• Design and implement DevOps and change management processes in line with industry standards and SLaM Digital Services policies.
• Manage deployment of pipelines into operational services, including monitoring and performance reporting.
• Ensure services remain cost-effective and within budget.
• Communicate service design, availability, outputs and performance to stakeholders.
• Coordinate testing of service outputs for clinical and research use and ensure the SLaM cloud-based NLP infrastructure remains operational.
• Work with SLaM technical teams and suppliers providing 4th-line support to ensure infrastructure meets operational needs.
• Design and manage all aspects of the MH-TAC service, including commercial, contractual, governance, budget and costing activities.
• Lead relationships with MH-TAC partners and customers.
• Develop and deliver MH-TAC training and awareness materials.
  
  The successful applicant will have advanced technical expertise in NLP, AI methodologies and cloud infrastructure, alongside excellent leadership, supervision and communication skills. They will possess extensive knowledge of electronic health record systems within a secondary mental health NHS Trust and experience working with clinical and academic partners and customers.
  
  South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust has a rich history, well-established community links and an international reputation. We deliver specialist services in the London boroughs of Croydon, Lambeth, Lewisham and Southwark, Bexley, Bromley, Greenwich, Wandsworth and Richmond.
We are committed to provide a high quality and specialist care to our service users and we are recognised for our care and treatment we provide. The Care Quality Commission already rates our services as 'good'. The trust recognises the unique and valuable contribution that people with lived experience of mental illness can bring to a role.We therefore welcome applications from people with lived experience and consider them as an asset to the Trust. Our Values We take pride in providing specialist care to our service users where our Trust values and our promise to be caring, kind, polite, prompt, honest, listen and do what I say I'm going to do is at the heart of everything we do. When you join us, you'll be part of something special. As a Trust we are happy to talk flexible working.