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About

On the name

Kairos (Καιρός), a god of Time, but not the one we usually think of. That's Chronos — the relentless mathematical clockwise march of seconds into years. Kairos is something else: son of Zeus and Tyche, the god of the opportune moment.

He is depicted as a figure in swift motion — winged at the heel, carrying scales in one hand to show that its the moment that tips the balance. His hair is odd, with a long forelock at the front, and bald at the back: catch him by it as he approaches, once he has passed there is nothing left to hold. He is Now, always somewhere between what has not yet arrived and what has already gone.

So what's the relevance? In clinical medicine, we encounter Kairos constantly. The lab result that demands action today, not next week. The consultation where a patient mentions something in passing that changes everything. The window between presentation and irreversible harm.

That is what this practice is named for.

Clinician first

I'm Jez McCole. I qualified in 1999 from Sheffield Medical School, and have been a GP since 2006. Before I think about data, software, frameworks and dashboards, I see patients. That order is not incidental. It is where everything else begins.

The clinical encounter is where I understand which tools fail, where pathways break down, and where the gap between what the system records and what the patient needs is most visible. The technical work I do exists to close that gap.

The digital work

I work primarily within the NHS's established clinical systems — EMIS Web and TPP SystmOne — with an eye on the challenger systems beginning to reshape primary care IT, Medicus among them. The tools I build are designed to fit inside the clinical workflow.

The portfolio shown here was built in close collaboration with Primary Care IT Ltd — a team I have worked alongside to design and deliver decision support tools in active daily use in primary care.

On patient data

Patient data is not a resource. It is an entrusted record of a person's life.

Data in a clinical record exists first to serve the patient it describes — to improve the quality and safety of their care, to surface risks that might otherwise be missed, to support the decisions made in the room.

Secondary use of that data — for research, population health, quality improvement — can be genuinely valuable. I support it. But the conditions are non-negotiable: consent where consent is possible; absolute integrity where it is not; and the certain understanding that an individual must never be identifiable through their data after it leaves the safe haven of their record. Re-identification is not an acceptable trade-off for any research benefit.

I arrived at these positions through practice, not through policy. They reflect what I believe the relationship between a patient and their GP requires.

Both arms

These two commitments — advancing clinical capability through data, and protecting every patient's right to privacy — can feel as though they pull in opposite directions. Sometimes they do.

Kairos Medical Informatics exists in that tension, working to serve both.

Clinical and Digital

Two halves of the same job. Everything digital I build starts in the clinical encounter; everything clinical benefits from the digital work catching what the record and the guideline don't.

Clinical

GP since 2006, Sheffield.

  • Full-scope GP partner working in NHS primary care, seeing patients as the anchor for every other piece of work.
  • Clinical involvement in Sheffield CASES — the Clinical Assessment, Support & Education Service that peer-reviews GP referrals and advises on the most appropriate care setting.
  • Referral quality, peer review, and clinician-mentoring work grounded in day-to-day NHS pathways rather than pure policy.
  • Ongoing curiosity about where the record, the guideline, and what the patient actually needs pull apart — and what to build in that gap.

Digital

Clinician-first informatics and clinical decision support.

  • Founder of Kairos Medical Informatics — building the LUMIN platform (Locally Unified Medical Intelligence Navigator) on which Sheffield CASES runs as the flagship instance.
  • Working through the NHS supplier-compliance stack in the open: CIS2 onboarding, DCB0129 clinical safety, DTAC readiness — playbooks written from live experience, not theory.
  • Free public tools on this site (NHS waiting-times explorers, FairShare, compliance playbooks) — built to be useful without a login and without collecting personal data.
  • Work primarily inside EMIS Web and TPP SystmOne, with an eye on challenger systems reshaping primary-care IT.

More on the digital side under Tools & Demos and Projects.

Working towards

We are working towards governance and security accreditation including Cyber Essentials and the Data Security and Protection Toolkit. These are future goals only and are not claimed today.

If this resonates with what you are trying to build, I would be glad to hear from you.

Get in touch