Roadmap to Successful Digital Health Ecosystems: A Global Perspective

Evelyn Hovenga, RN, PhD, FACS, FANC, FIAHSI, currently manages eHealth Education, an RTO, and the not-for-profit Global eHealth Collaborative (GeHCo) and continues to work as a digital health consultant. She retired as Professor of Health Informatics in 2007, following a 25-year career in this discipline with a focus on standards development as these apply to EHRs, semantic interoperability, and terminology and is Honorary Senior Research Associate at the Centre for Health Informatics and Multiprofessional Education, University College London (http://www.chime.ucl.ac.uk/). Evelyn started her career as a registered nurse; has health executive, public service, educational and research experience; obtained a PhD in Health Administration (Nursing Informatics); initiated and hosted the first National Health Informatics Conference (HIC) in Melbourne in 1993; is one of the founders of HISA and the Australasian College of Health Informatics; and is a founding fellow of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics (FIAHSI), Geneva. She is also widely published. Evelyn is an honorary member of the International Medical Informatics Association’s Nursing Informatics SIG as a result of representing Australian nurses from 1984 for many years, as a member and Past Chair of this group.

Heather Grain, ADip HIM, Dip TDD, GDip IS, MHI, FAIDH, FMU, FIAHSI, has international expertise in the development, implementation, management, and governance of digital health systems and data, including terminologies and classifications. Heather is a leader of the electronic health record system and information resources design and implementation, having worked in this area in many countries. She is a respected eHealth leader having held leadership roles in health informatics at the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), Health Level 7 International or HL7 (the organization responsible for the development of health information exchange standards (computer to computer), and SNOMED International (the organization responsible for clinical terminology development to represent meaning in information systems) and currently leads the Information Governance Ad Hoc Group for ISO TC215. Heather has guided many new people into health informatics as an educator. She has developed and delivered courses for eHealth Education, Melbourne University, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and La Trobe universities, and designed the Electronic Health Records Online Learning (eHRoL) clinical coding simulation and training tool with its associated learning management system for the not-for-profit Global eHealth Collaborative (GeHCo). She understands the practical as well as the theoretical aspects of digital health, having worked with governments, insurers, healthcare organizations, various clinical domains, and researchers. The need for the harmonization of data within systems in healthcare is a key to her philosophy in order to reduce costs and improve outcomes of healthcare systems. She works to develop appropriate skills and education strategies to advance digitally supported healthcare.