Summary

Health Information Standards Organisation (HISO) operates under Standards New Zealand to convene the national mirror committee for the ISO/TC 215 Health informatics technical committee of the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO).

We received nominations from the sector and our proposal to form the national mirror committee was ratified by the Standards Approval Board in March 2021.

The Standards Approval Board is an independent statutory board set up under the Standards and Accreditation Act 2015. The Board commenced in March 2016 and is responsible for approving the membership of standards development committees and standards that are developed by these committees.

Being a participating member allows us to have input to international data and digital standards that can be adopted in New Zealand to improve our health and disability system.

Responsibilities

The ISO/TC 215 Health informatics national mirror committee has responsibility to:

  • Monitor all ISO/TC 215 work items, drafts and ballots
  • Review the technical content of documents out for comment and formulate a national position
  • Inform Standards NZ of the position reached on ISO/TC 215 work proposal (NP), committee draft (CD), draft international standard (DIS) and final draft international standard (FDIS) documents
  • Work with Standards NZ to enter a vote on all NP, CD, DIS and FDIS documents
  • Provide a valid technical justification for any negative vote
  • Inform Standards NZ of the position reached on ISO standards under systematic five-year review
  • Consult with stakeholders in forming a national position on international matters

Membership

Amy Chen

Amy Chen

BDS, PGDip (Digital Health) 

Amy is a general dentist with a keen interest in data and digital transformations. She holds a teaching position at the University of Otago as a Professional Practice Fellow where she trains undergraduate students in the use of dental EHR. She enjoys caring for her patients with the latest digital dental software and diagnostic equipment in her private practice. 

In her own time, Amy enjoys learning and exploring the potential for digital health innovations to improve patient experience and address dental anxiety. She believes meaningful data sharing and international standards are critical to empower the development of safe, effective and person-centred digital health solutions that fully embrace the creativity of innovators and are equitable to consumers. 

Amy is a core member of the dental working group in the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) and is an active member of the Clinical Informatics Leadership Network (CLiN), Health Informatics New Zealand (HiNZ) and Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS). 

She holds a Bachelor's degree in Dental Surgery and Post Graduate Diploma in Digital Health from the University of Otago.

Susanne Ames

Susanne Ames

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.

Micah Davison

Micah Davison

Micah Davison is a Senior Advisor in Te Whatu Ora’s Data and Digital Standards team. He manages a portfolio of health data standards, with a focus on identity, privacy, trust and data governance, where he is a subject matter expert. Micah has led work to introduce a new edition of the Health Information Security Framework as well as updates to the Consumer Health Identity Standard and mental health data collection standards.

Prior to joining Te Whatu Ora, Micah led the development of the Stats NZ data standard for gender, sex and variations of sex characteristics, which is now a mandated data standard for all of government.
He enjoys working collaboratively with a range of stakeholders to create inclusive and future focused standards to support Aotearoa’s health system and the priorities set by Te Pae Tata Interim New Zealand Health Plan.

As part of his role, Micah has supported the ISO/TC 215 IRG by coordinating the response to the recent ISO/TC 215 Sex and gender in electronic health records ballot, as well as liaising with HL7 and other international forums on sex and gender. He has completed education courses on SNOMED CT and HL7 FHIR and helps to manage the NZ Health Terminology Service operated by Te Whatu Ora.

Micah is part way through a Master of Health Sciences, with a focus on bioethics and health information management.

Dr Koray Atalag

Dr Koray Atalag

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 Wong

Samuel Wong

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 Billing

Nathan Billing

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.

Angela Pidd

Angela Pidd

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.

Alastair Kenworthy

Alastair Kenworthy

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.

Dr Inga Hunter

Dr Inga Hunter

Inga Hunter is an Associate Professor and Director of the Health Services Management programme Massey University. Her research interests include health informatics, in particular using digital technology to support models of healthcare delivery. This research has an applied end-user focus, translating end-user research into clinical practice/health sector policy.

Inga Hunter is an Associate Professor and Director of the Health Services Management programme Massey University. Her research interests include health informatics, in particular using digital technology to support models of healthcare delivery. This research has an applied end-user focus, translating end-user research into clinical practice/health sector policy.Inga is a medical doctor with an MPhil (Information Systems) and is a Fellow of the Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners (FRNZCGP), Fellow of the Australasian College of Health Informatics (FACHI), and Foundation Fellow of Health Informatics New Zealand (FHiNZ). 

Inga now works fulltime at Massey University but until 2019 she worked for 20 years part time in clinical medical practice and part-time at the University. She has 30 years clinical experience in a variety of clinical settings in general practice, primary, secondary, and tertiary care in Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, along with 20 years research and teaching experience in health informatics, information technology and health services management.  

Inga has served on a variety of international, national, regional and local groups and boards within the health informatics domain, most recently:

  • NZ Telehealth Forum
  • IMIA Telehealth working group
  • NZ representative, Asia-Pacific Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) and International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA)
  • Health Research Council College of Experts and peer reviewer
  • Australasian Institute of Digital Health (AIDH)
  • Strategic ICT Governance Group/Clinical Reference Group, MidCentral DHB
  • National Information Clinical Leadership Group
  • Health Information Governance Expert Advisory Group
  • Health Informatics New Zealand (HiNZ)

She has more than 100 publications including the HISO standards HISO 10029:2009 Health Information Security Framework and HISO 10064:2017 Health information Governance Guidelines.

Dr Derek Buchanan

Dr Derek Buchanan

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.

Keith Duddy

Keith Duddy

Keith Duddy is a senior advisor at New Zealand healthcare software consultancy and platform company S23M. During his career in health information technology he has made major contributions to standards work with the Object Management Group (OMG), ISO and HL7. At Australia’s National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA) he had one of the leading technical roles in developing the My Health Record national e-health record. He is now a member of the HL7 New Zealand working group that is localising the HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard. He is a founder and current coordinator of the Aotearoa New Zealand Interoperability Lab (ANZIL), which works with Te Whatu Ora.

Keith specialises in semantic modelling and interoperability and played a major role in introducing these concepts to the OMG. He was a member of the team that produced the Meta Object Facility Specification Version 2, the first formal definition of the Unified Modelling Language (UML). Keith served two terms on the OMG Architecture Board. Keith also worked on the ISO Reference Model for Open Distributed Computing (RM-ODP) and OpenEHR

Working for NEHTA, Keith led the development of standards and modelling tools to support the Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR), which became Australia’s My Health Record. Keith helped introduce the FHIR standard to NEHTA. In recent work with Te Whatu Ora and HL7 New Zealand, Keith has contributed to the development of the localisation of the International Patient Summary (IPS) standard.

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