Speaker Profiles

Dr Nathan Pinskier is a Melbourne GP with an extensive involvement in primary health care. He specialises in practice management systems, information technology, change management and general practice accreditation. Nathan holds a diploma in Practice Management from the University of New England Partnerships and holds fellowships with the Australian Association of Practice Managers (FAAPM) and the Australian Association for Quality in Healthcare (FAAQHC). Nathan was involved in the development and implementation of the information security standards for the general practice sector. He has a special interest in developing business applications that leverage the capacity of the Internet.

Dr Ruth Dunkin has over 30 years experience in the public and higher education sectors, with a strong background and interest in public policy.

She gained experience in public policy development, evaluation and implementation in the Victorian Public Service in departments such as Treasury, Premiers and Transport.

Moving from the public sector to the Hay Group's strategic management practice, she worked on strategy development and strategic human resource strategies with clients in the finance, aerospace and utility sectors.

She then moved to RMIT University where she was Deputy Vice-Chancellor, first in resource management and then in academic management. She was Vice‑Chancellor of RMIT University between 2000 and 2004.

Since leaving RMIT Ruth has been involved in policy development and strategy consulting and advisory work for a variety of clients.

She has a Masters in Public Administration from Harvard and a PhD in organisational change from the University of Melbourne.

Jason Trethowan is the Chief Executive Officer of the General Practitioners Association of Geelong. He has a background in health informatics, health information management and holds a Masters degree in business administration. Jason has substantial experience in partnerships, business operations, health services development and corporate governance. Jason is an active in the development of primary healthcare in his community and has particularly enjoyed helping Geelong to become the e-health capital of Australia.

Rod is the national CEO of the Aged Care Association Australia, which represents some 800 aged care providers across Australia.

Prior to this role Rod spent many years working in the health and associated fields. He has managed acute care hospitals, the last being as manager of the Prince of Wales campus in Sydney.

For three years Rod worked for Australian Business as their Industry Liaison Manager, which involved the creation of a nationally coordinated umbrella organisation covering the Chambers of Commerce and Industry in Australia.

He has previously been involved in Association Management and conducting a pilot program with the Uniting Church and the Federal Attorney Generals Department to prove the veracity of adjunct dispute resolution services outside of the litigation mainstream.

Rod also has an ongoing interest in ethics and medicine and has been a member of the Ethics Committee of the New Children's Hospital in Sydney.

Liz Forman heads the eHealth Branch, Department of Health and Ageing. The focus of the Branch is on policy directions, governance arrangements and foundations to underpin the national implementation of eHealth.

Ms Forman’s previous public sector roles include workplace relations and employment policy and regional telecommunications policy.

Greg Henschke is the Patient Information Recall Support (PIRS) Officer for the Aboriginal Medical Services Alliance Northern Territory (AMSANT). In this role he works with Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisations (ACCHOs) to strategically use their PIRS so that accurate population health data can be extracted for reporting to boards, management and funders. This data helps to plan, target and evaluate health programs and assists with continuous quality improvement. Greg is a Registered Nurse who has worked in the NT for 16 years in the areas of remote community health, health education and information management. Greg spent 4 years working with the Katherine West Health Board overseeing the implementation of the PIRS Communicare into their 7 remote health centres run over a Wide Area Network to a central database in a Sydney Data Centre. He has been in his current role for 2 ½ years and has assisted NT ACCHOs in moving into an eHealth environment and delivering data for the first round of NT Aboriginal Health Key Performance Indicators.

Phil Gurney is CEO of the Australian e-Health Research Centre (AEHRC) - a joint CSIRO and Queensland government initiative.

Prior to this appointment, Dr Gurney advised executive teams at SMEs, not for profit and government organisations. This includes consultancy work for the charity, Brotherhood of St Laurence, where he advised on the establishment of the Innovation Hub to support the Brotherhood's vision for an Australia free of poverty. More recently, he was a senior executive at Leica Biosystems in Melbourne, where he was focused on strategic development to build market opportunities in tissue pathology. Highlights of his tenure include leading the acquisition of a US pathology image-analysis company, and steering the development of technologies for error minimisation in pathology sample handling.

In 1996, Dr Gurney co-founded Virtual Photonics Pty Ltd (now called VPIsystems Inc), a network planning software company. He held the position of Managing Director of the Asia-Pacific region, and was a board member of the Australian and US companies.

Ian Birks is the current Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA) and has been in this role since in April 2008. The AIIA is the peak industry body for information technology provider companies with approximately 500 member companies.

Prior to this appointment Ian had been a National Board Member of the AIIA and has served in this capacity since 2004. During this time Ian was actively involved in industry workforce and skills issues as an advisor to the association's initiatives in this area.

Early in 2008 Ian stepped down as the Managing Director of ASX-listed IT research and advisory firm Ideas International Limited after 5 years at the helm and 15 prior years in senior roles building the company up from its foundation. He remains a non-executive director of Ideas International. Prior to Ideas, Ian worked in a number of senior roles for Prime Computer of Australia.

Pradeep Ray is the Director of the Asia Pacific ubiquitous Healthcare Research Centre (APuHC) at the University of New South Wales. As part of the Centre's research programs, he has been leading a number of collaborative research projects on eHealth with global organizations, industry and academia in Europe, North America and Asia. His work on the WHO project (which involves four countries in Asia-Pacific) on the assessment of eHealth for Health care Delivery led to the recent decision on the WHO Collaborating Centre on eHealth at UNSW.

Pradeep is now the Vice Chair of eHealth Committee at IEEE Communication Society. The President of IEEE Communication Society nominated Pradeep as a global spokesperson on Telemedicine as part of the IEEE International Visibility Initiative from 2008. His team was invited by the IEEE Humanitarian Technology Challenge to write the first report on technology challenges for eHealth in 2008.

He is the project coordinator of the newly formed Alliance for Clinical Excellence that promotes collaborative work amongst industry, academia and governments for the benefit assessment of Healthcare IT.

Athena Ermides has been involved in aged care since 1980 and was the first Director of Nursing at St Nicholas Nursing Home, then the first ethnic specific provider of residential aged care in Brisbane. She is currently the General Manager at Berlasco Court Caring Centre, a provider of high level residential aged care to those from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.

Athena has served on many State and Commonwealth Advisory committees including some years on the Aged Care Planning committee, as a representative of the Ethnic Communities Council of Queensland, and is currently the chair of the Aged Care Queensland Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Network, as well as the Vice President of NIMAC, and is currently serving the second year on the Board of Aged Care Queensland.

Anna Wise is the Senior Policy Manager at the Consumers Health Forum of Australia, which is the national peak body representing the interests of Australian healthcare consumers. Anna works across a broad range of health policy areas including the health reform agenda, primary health care, e-health and acute care. Before joining CHF, she worked at the Mental Health Council of Australia, working on diverse mental health policy issues and contributing to major reports on homelessness and mental illness and carers of people with mental illness. Anna's academic background is in the sociology of health and medicine.

Dr Tony Hobbs is a GP Obstetrician from Cootamundra on the south- west slopes of NSW, where he has been involved in the establishment of an innovative integrated primary care service.

He was Chair of the External Reference Group working with the DoHA to develop Australia's first National Primary Health Care Strategy. He is the immediate past Chair of the Australian General Practice Network. He is the Chair of the Riverina Division of General practice and Primary Health. He has recently been appointed to the NHMRC Prevention and Community Health Committee.

Adam Powick is a Deloitte Partner with over 20 years consulting experience in Australia, Asia and the United States. Adam specialises in the provision of consulting services to clients in areas such as ICT strategic planning, IT business case development, and large scale IT program design and management.

Adam is the leader of Deloitte's national technology consulting practice and has a health and public sector industry focus. Adam was the lead author of the recently completed national eHealth strategy and has provided eHealth consulting services for clients including NEHTA, Queensland Health, DHS (Vic), DoHA, DHHS (Tasmania) and the DHS (Vic) HealthSMART program. He is a recognised thought leader on eHealth and provides advice to clients and government on the delivery of eHealth in Australia.

Paul Naismith is the CEO of Fred Health as well as a practising pharmacist. Fred Health is Australia's largest pharmacy IT solution provider with over 3,000 pharmacies using their market leading products including Fred Dispense, Fred Office and Fred Net broadband.

Paul's aspiration is to reduce dispensing errors using technology and limiting computer related risks for pharmacists and patients. He believes connected computer systems can provide better patient outcomes and his vision is that pharmacists be a key part of any large integrated health IT solution.

This resulted in his collaboration to create the original Fred Dispense software in 1991 and his constant striving to improve pharmacy IT ever since.

In 2009 Paul launched eRx Script Exchange which provides the first Australia wide electronic prescription service linking doctors and pharmacies.

He is a member of the advisory board for the pharmacy indemnity provider PDL, a Fellow of the Australian College of Pharmacy Practice and Management and a member of the Pharmacy Guild and the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia and a director of the Australian Pharmaceutical Publishing Company.

Dr Ross Nable has worked as a research scientist and manager for 20 years, principally with the CSIRO.

He moved to divisions of general practice 10 years ago and spent the first nine years with North & West Queensland Primary Health Care as Deputy CEO. In this role he was responsible for quality, evaluation and information management.

Ross now works with General Practice Victoria and is the Manager for Population Health and eHealth.

Dr Louise Schaper is the CEO of Health Informatics Society of Australia (HISA) and has been actively involved in health informatics for ten years. With a background as an occupational therapist and a PhD on technology acceptance amongst healthcare professionals, Louise is a world leader in allied health informatics. In addition to her role with HISA, Louise is part of NEHTA's Clinical Leads team and chairs the E-Health International Advisory Group of the World Federation of Occupational Therapists. As a leading Australian professional association, HISA provides a focus for health informatics, its practitioners, industry and users. HISA provides leadership in e-health and works toward building the discipline of health informatics with application across the spectrum of healthcare services.

Professor Michael Georgeff is Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Precedence Health Care, a company providing Internet-based chronic disease management services for the health profession, and Professor in the Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences at Monash University. He is a principal advisor to government and industry in the US, Europe and Australia on information technology strategy in health care and business and serves on the boards of various companies.

In 1983, as Program Director in the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI International, Professor Georgeff and his team created one of the first implementations of an intelligent software agent, deploying it on NASA's space shuttle. In 1988 he was invited back to Australia by the Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, to establish the Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute.

Professor Georgeff is currently leading a number of initiatives in Australia to establish networks of broadband-based health technologies and services. As a member of the Deloitte team, he helped produce the National e-Health Strategy for Australia. He is also a founding member of the Australian National Consultative Committee on e-Health and a member of the Health Informatics Society of Australia.

Geoff Rinaldi is the Managing Director of Tranzform Group, a firm that specialises in ensuring that organisation’s gain the full benefit they seek from their investments in business change projects. With a background and qualifications in econometrics, Geoff spent the early part of his working life with IBM where he helped many clients develop business cases and financial models to justify their technology investments. After growing the value of two ASX-listed firms by building and running their contract consulting practices, Geoff was pulled by a strong desire to change the approach of delivering consulting services from a ‘systems implementation’ to a ‘value delivered’ focus. Since few in the industry supported a value-driven approach, he saw the opportunity to link up with a number of former partners from leading consulting firms under the Tranzform Group banner and to create techniques for ensuring that investments in business change deliver measureable benefits throughout implementation.

During ten years of operation, Tranzform Group has delivered business initiatives for most of the major Australian banking and insurance companies and a wide range of government clients, including current assignments managing the 2011 NSW State election and a significant program of pharmacy reform for the NSW Department of Health.

Claire Johansson joined Wurli-Wurlinjang (WWJ) Health Service in July 2009. As part of the senior management team Claire is responsible for accreditation, planning, policy, information technology and computerized medical records.

Before joining WWJ, Claire was the Assistant Director for the Shared Electronic Health Record service in the Northern Territory and was responsible for the clinician engagement and uptake of the SEHR. In this position, Claire was able to dramatically improve the number of registered clinicians and the number of sites connected to the service by developing close and collaborative partnership with Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Services, government health care facilities and improving the quality of the clinical information contained within the SEHR.

Claire is passionate about improving communication between different health care providers along the patient's journey in order to achieve better health outcomes for all people receiving care, particularly for Aboriginal people.

Claire has a Masters degree in Business Administration and is an Associate Fellow with Australian College of Health Service Executives. In 2003 Claire received an Excellence Award for Indigenous Health from the Director General, Qld Health