Clinicians in digital health series launched
Date: 20 June 2018
eHealthNews is launching a series of articles profiling clinicians working in digital health.
The aim is to give greater visibility to clinical leads within digital health and investigate what their role is and the
benefits this brings to their organisations.
We are looking for your feedback on this, so please take our quick survey on Clinicians in Digital Health.
A networking event for clinicians working in informatics roles will also be held in Wellington on the day before the
Health Informatics New Zealand conference on 20 November 2018.
Waikato DHB clinical director information services and virtual healthcare Ruth Large is organising the HiNZ networking
event.
She says a group of clinical leads in digital health has developed organically in New Zealand and there are now a large
number of formal and informal roles.
While the chief information officers of the DHBs and some other organisations meet on a regular basis, there is no
formal network for people in clinical informatics roles.
“We’re all doing very different stuff up and down the country so it’s about pooling that information, so we don’t
recreate the wheel. I hope it will give us ideas to take back to our respective organisations,” Large explains.
The first in the new monthly series, published today, is a profile of Anna Marie Scroggins, clinical informatics
specialist at MercyAscot, who says she is an advocate for end users of digital health systems.
Scroggins welcomes any opportunity to get together with other people in clinical informatics roles in order to share
experiences.
“It’s great to have ways to disseminate ideas and learning because these projects are hard and if we can share our
mistakes as well as our successes it can really help,” she says.
Second in the profile series will be Karl Cole, chief clinical information officer at shared services agency
HealthAlliance.
Cole spends much of his time engaging with clinical champions for the agency’s many technology projects and says being a
clinician himself helps, as they speak the same language.
Lara Hopley, clinical advisor digital innovations and anaesthetist at Waitemata DHB, is funded for two days a week in
her IT role.
She says that continuing with her clinical work really helps as she has to use the systems being implemented.
“When you are living what you are building, it makes a huge difference to how you build things and how you iterate going
forward,” Hopley explains.
Anyone interested in attending the networking event can email news@hinz.org.nz or email Ruth Large directly.
Read the first profile in this series, Anna Marie Scroggins.
Take our quick survey on Clinicians in Digital Health
Find out more about the HiNZ Conference 2018.