ISO/TC 215 Health informatics national mirror committee

Susanne is an independent health IT consultant with Melete Ltd. She is associated with SNOMED International and is an HL7 New Zealand member. Susanne has deep experience working with health information in the USA and New Zealand including:

• Streamlining reporting for Washington state health programmes, insurance plan procurement, oversight of contract actuarial services and legislative proposal analysis
• Operations management and quality improvements for internal clinical advice at the NZ Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC), including reviews of how diagnosis coding is used and interpreted for treatment
• Development of the ACC SNOMED to Read mapping table and update process, and contract oversight for external review and expansion. This included leading a clinical project team, and liaising with the NZ Ministry of Health and other users and stakeholders
• Primary care support, including implementing forms, software and other improvements that move information transmission from manual, paper-based processes to automated data capture.

Her postgraduate education includes:

• Master’s degree in Public Administration, University of Washington
• Post graduate diploma in Primary Health and General Practice (distinction)
• SNOMED Foundation and implementation courses.
• Presentations about SNOMED and ACC’s clinical terminology use to Health Informatics NZ, NZ private hospital representatives, allied health stakeholders and the Practice Managers and Administrations Association of NZ.

BA Mb BChir DO FRCS FRANZCO

Qualified as a medical doctor in 1971, following a first degree in Social Anthropology in 1968, both from Cambridge University, and after early experience in Ophthalmology in 1973 in West Africa I achieved the Diploma in Ophthalmology in 1974 from the Royal College of Surgeons in 1974. Since then I have continued with both interests, studying human interaction  from 1974-1977 supported by the UK Social Science Research Council. I spent two years back in Cambridge UK from 1979 -81 working in both Neurology/Neurosurgery and Ophthalmology at Addenbroooks Hospital, then back to London for the residency program in Ophthalmology at Moorfields Eye Hospital from 1981-84. I emigrated to NZ in 1985, first as Senior Lecturer in Ophthalmology at Otago in 1985, then as solo Ophthalmologist in Timaru from 1988 until I retired in 2015. I have been involved in locum Ophthalmology work since.

From 1989 I began work on an EHR and in 1993 produced my first version for Cataract, Glaucoma, and Diabetic retinopathy screening. I produced the first General Ophthalmology record in 1995 when I went paperless in both public and private practices in Timaru. From 1998 I began working with Standards NZ then led by Mr Proctor and with Lindsay Stewart of the MOH working up my ‘immunological model’ of access control to the EHR. After an HL7 International meeting in 2001,  I modified my project  to become the ‘Immunological Model for access control to the CDA’, and presented this at HL7 meetings. I also represented NZ at the first meeting of ISO/TC 215, and presented the same ideas at that forum, and delivered a keynote address on EHR standards at the World Ophthalmology Congress meeting in the year 2000 in Sydney

In  2020 I became involved in the HL7 project to create a FHIR Implementation guide -IG- for Ophthalmology which is still running and am a co-author of a paper accepted for the forthcoming ARVO the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology in May 2021.

I recognise that a successful resolution to the long running arguments about EHR communication standards is now very urgent, and the NZ ISO /TC 215 group may be a forum for me to help and hopefully quite soon now complete the project of getting a global, practical and facilitatory EHR currency.

Derek is a medical doctor and digital specialist who has more than 15 years of experience in the health sector. He has a strong interest in various standards and has been part of international working groups including HL7, SNOMED CT and BPM+ Health. He holds active membership with ITPNZ, BCS, HiNZ and is an associate of ISC2. He has completed degrees in medicine, software engineering and business and holds several industry certifications. His past work experience includes roles across a range of health specialities from primary to tertiary healthcare with current membership to RNZCUC and RANZCP. His past informatics work includes the HIKER group and HealthAlliance. He continues to work in both clinical and non-clinical roles.

In health tech, he has completed HL7 FHIR Proficiency Certification and SNOMED CT courses (Foundation, Authoring 1 and Implementation). His interests in health technology are varied, but range from cybersecurity, precision medicine and AI/Machine learning, to the use of cloud technology and IoMT. Outside of health technology, he has been involved in projects in agritech, edutech and soctech. He has experience working in governance, consultancy and advisory roles - participating in several initiatives relevant to New Zealand. He continues to be involved in the not-for-profit and social enterprise space. Derek is a strong believer in standards and supports the role of the ISO/TC 215 IRG in the New Zealand health ecosystem.

MD, PhD, FAIDH

Koray is a medical doctor with a PhD in Information Systems and a Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Digital Health (FAIDH). Having significant experience in digital health, in particular electronic health records (EHR) and interoperability, he is passionate about making ICT reach its full potential in healthcare. Koray serves as CIO and Chief Scientist at The Clinician, a health IT company, that has created an interoperable platform to engage patients, collect patient reported outcome/experience measures (PROMs and PREMs) to create actionable insights and drive value-based care.

Koray holds an honorary academic appointment as senior research fellow at the Auckland Bioengineering Institute of the University of Auckland. His main research areas are electronic health record and interoperability standards, clinical decision support systems and computational physiology. Koray taught the Healthcare Decision Systems course (HLTHINFO 730) as part of the Postgraduate Diploma in Health Informatics Programme at the University of Auckland and supervise Masters and PhD students.

Having been deeply involved in HL7 and openEHR (a global health informatics standards for electronic health records and interoperability), Koray seeks to improve software maintainability and enable interoperability by tackling the complexity and changeability of health information using computable models – called Archetypes.

Koray co-authored the New Zealand Interoperability Reference Architecture, published as a HISO standard in 2012, and led technical evaluations of major health IT innovation projects. He has served as an elected member of the openEHR Foundation Management Board, past vice-chair and now an HL7 New Zealand Board member.

Samuel is VP Products at Vensa Health and co-chair of the NZHIT Virtual Health Industry Group.

Samuel Wong has been involved in the healthcare sector for over 20 years. His experiences in health informatics and health standards spans across a wide range of sectors covering clinical record management in hospitals, and working in senior analytics lead or data governance/architect roles in primary health organisations, national emergency ambulance services, and national telehealth services. Supplementary projects also involved data collaborations with most of the directorates at the Ministry of Health, ESR, R&D in Medtech/Biotech industry and most recently, joining the Health IT industry. His current role is the VP Product Innovations at Vensa Health, one of the national patient portal providers.  In addition, he also serves as the Chair of NZHiT’s Virtual Health Industry Group, and part of the NZ Telehealth Leadership Group. 

In his various roles, Samuel has been accustomed to managing and advocating health information standards, in trying to create interoperability between various systems for patient care and health system management purposes. Understanding care of a patient has to involve the use of clinical terminologies, like SNOMED CT, related codes such as NZ Formulary, NZULM and Pharmacode, or diagnostic/procedure codes found in ICD-10-AM, READ and LOINC. Patients also require standards to describe occupations, ethnicities, industries, identity and gender/sexual orientation. Through his senior roles, he was also completed training on service provisions for quality (e.g. ISO9001, ISO13485) as well as national/international privacy standards and sector-wide data governance. The range of integration between understanding these standards has helped provide opportunities for using data towards AI-based contextual learning models to improve care pathways which is in line with the direction of ISO/TC 215.

Samuel has attained a BSc (Biomedical Sciences) and a PGDipSci (Medical Sciences) at the University of Auckland. For clinical practice, he has qualified for the National Diploma in Ambulance Practice. In 2018, he completed the LEAD:Corporate Innovation Certificate from Stanford University.

Nathan is an information systems analyst and digital product owner at Auckland District Health Board. He holds a Master of Science in Health Informatics from the University of Edinburgh. He has over 12 years clinical experience and has served within a wide range of medical and surgical dietetic specialties both in community and acute care settings, across three continents. He continues to hold New Zealand Dietetic Registration and got involved with HL7 when working with the American Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics in developing Electronic Nutrition Care Process Record System Functional Profile, to establish conformance to the HL7 International EHR-S Functional Model Release 2. Subsequent to this he has been involved with the SNOMED Nutrition Care Process Terminology Clinical Project Group, which is working through the addition of Nutrition terms to the international version of SNOMED.

Nathan is a former board member of Health Informatics New Zealand (HINZ), and has helped to organise the annual HiNZ conference, present topics and chair sessions.

Jerome is passionate about using data intelligently to improve healthcare quality for better & more equitable health outcomes and whānau experiences. Aotearoa's New Zealand's Pharmacist of the Year in 2017, he is currently Chief Strategic Advisor at the Te Pou Whakamana Kaimatū o Aotearoa (Pharmacy Council of NZ).

Jerome has served on the Boards of the Pharmaceutical Society of NZ Inc. and NZ Hospital Pharmacists' Association and has held senior roles such as Clinical Director (Clinical Governance, Quality & Patient Safety) at BOPDHB, Lead Advisor (Informatics, Improvement & Research) at Waitemata DHB's Institute for Innovation & Improvement (i3) and Health Informatics & Formulary Pharmacist at CMDHB. He has a successful and award-winning record advancing organisational capability, capacity & culture relating to health intelligence, innovation, quality improvement, patient safety and medicines management.  

Jerome holds a PhD, MBA, and a Masters in Pharmacy Practice. He is an honorary lecturer University of Auckland’s School of Population Health & School of Pharmacy. With past collaborations on Precision Driven Health initiatives and a HealthRoundTable Innovation Fellow, Jerome is research active and is currently involved with several initiatives to more intelligently use data to inform more precise improvement of healthcare. Jerome brings strategic systems-think and a unique blend of skills, experience, compassion and drive to only help Aotearoa design and deliver health systems and model for better and more equitable health outcomes for New Zealanders but ensure they are fit-for-purpose in the future.

Angela is the Manager of Data Management, National Collections in the Data and Digital Directorate at the Ministry of Health. She holds graduate and post graduate qualifications from Victoria and Massey Universities in econometrics and business management. She has worked in various health data collection and distribution leadership roles in the New Zealand Health Information Service (NZHIS) and the Ministry of Health over the last 20 years and prior to that in other government departments.

In her current role Angela leads a team of data quality analysts and data management engineers to support those organisations that supply data to the national collections and those who use the data. She has been part of many sector and IT change projects relating to data collection and reporting. Since 2016 Angela has been the New Zealand representative on the Australian Independent Hospital Pricing Authority (IHPA) Diagnosis Related Groups (DRG) Technical Group and also sits on several health sector and cross government working groups. She is also involved in Ministry data privacy and stewardship processes. She has worked with both Statistics NZ and HISO on the development and implementation of data classifications and standards.

As Chief Standards Advisor, Alastair is the functional lead for data and digital standards at the Ministry of Health, responsible for the development and adoption of standards for an equitable, data-driven and digitally-enabled New Zealand health and disability system. Alastair works with clinical, consumer and industry groups to identify, develop and lead the adoption of standards, implementation guides and regulatory requirements.

He publishes and oversees the implementation of an interoperability roadmap for the health system, working with district health boards, primary health organisations, health providers, the software industry, other government agencies and standards development organisations to improve interoperability through standards. He oversees all significant ICT investment by district health boards to ensure conformance to standards.

In his current role, he chairs the Health Information Standards Organisation (HISO) committee. Alastair previously chaired the Health Sector Architects Group from 2013 to 2017.

Alastair has been the SNOMED International representative for New Zealand since 2017 and chaired the SNOMED International Member Forum from 2019 to 2021. He led the New Zealand hosting of the SNOMED International conference for 2016. He has also been Global Digital Health Partnership (GDHP) representative for New Zealand since 2018. Alastair chaired a Standards New Zealand committee in 2019 for the identical adoption of 10 ISO/IEC automatic identification and data capture standards.

Alastair is convenor of the ISO/TC 215 national mirror committee.