Executive Committee (Elected): Elizabeth Keller (Chair & Head of Delegation), Bev Knight (Vice-Chair), Finnie Flores (Vice-Chair), Don Newsham (past-Chair).
Elizabeth Keller, MA and BA (Hons), Chair cand Head of Canadian Delegation (Standards Council of Canada).
Elizabeth is a leading executive, strategist and integrator in Canadian digital health and a recognized health expert internationally. She was recently named one of the Top 10 Women Leaders in Digital Health in Canada by her peers. In her volunteer role as Chair for the MC, Elizabeth has worked on many standards initiatives; including patient summary standards sets, cross collaboration on the Joint Initiative Council, participation frameworks with the World Health Organization (WHO) and eSafety. Elizabeth brings extensive private sector experience from PwC, IBM and now in her current role for Amazon Web Services (AWS), as well as her last 10 years of experience as VP at OntarioMD, where she led dozens of provincial digital health roll-outs to clinicians. Elizabeth gladly volunteers her expertise and leadership in the healthcare community in Canada and internationally; as an elected Advisor to Digital Health Canada and CHIEF (Canada’s Health Informatics Executive Forum), as a writer and speaker at many global Health conferences and as a mentor to the next generation of digital health professionals.
Beverly Knight, Vice-Chair of MC/ISO TC215 Health Informatics (Standards Council of Canada).
Beverly is an established and respected terminology expert through her work with international terminology Standards Development Organizations including chairing work groups at HL7, SNOMED, and ISO/TC 215 WG 3, Semantic Content, and her work in terminology standards initiatives that she has led within Canada and for the WHO. As a former practicing clinician, Beverly has a passionate interest in advancing standards within digital health solutions and is an effective advisor to organizations that require pragmatic development of data and structured terminology strategies and implementation tactics. Beverly has led the development of numerous terminology assets for use in digital health projects including the pCLOCD, Canadian Clinical Drug Data Set and acted as an advisor for the Canadian Vaccine Catalogue.
Finnie Flores, MPH, MAEd, CPHIMS-CA, Vice-Chair of MC/ISO TC215 Health Informatics (Standards Council of Canada)
Finnie Flores is a certified professional in healthcare information and management systems with over 20 years’ experience. He has been actively involved in ISO/TC 215 for a number of years now including leading several international ISO standards work. He has been involved in standards development and governance in Canada for over a decade. As one of the founding leaders, he currently serves as co-lead of InfoCentral’s Health Analytics Community. He has extensive experience in health informatics standards development and implementation including HL7 (v2.x, 3.0, FHIR and CDA), ISO, pan-Canadian EHR standards, and SNOMED CT. He has experience in both private and public organizations such Canadian Institute for Health Information, Ontario Ministry of Health, eHealth Ontario, several digital imaging vendors, and most recently CGI. He has provided standards expertise in health information systems development for both clinical and analytics/health system management uses including CIHI’s Integrated interRAI Reporting System (IRRS), which is one of the early large-scale HL7 FHIR implementations in Canada. He has presented on health informatics standards as guest lecturer in master’s program in several academic institutions. He is currently a senior consultant in analytics management at CGI and is involved in health analytics projects in various organizations.
Don Newsham, past Chair of MC/ISO TC215 Health Informatics
Don brings over 30 years of health informatics experience through former CEO and CIO roles with private, public and not for profit sectors. Within the standards community, both nationally and internationally, Don is an engaged, respected, distinguished, and highly contributing leader for standardization. He has served as an expert, member, advisor and mentor for standards initiatives and organizations including ISO/TC 215, the Joint Initiative Council, the Standards Council of Canada and in the recent past, with the Canada Health Infoway Standards Collaborative Communities, with various WHO initiatives and with other countries requiring standards expertise. Don was also a former convener of TC 215 Working Group 1, a standards author, a member of the Joint Initiative Council (JIC), the recent co-lead of the joint SDO harmonization initiative (CAG3), and a Task Force chair and joint author for the Patient Summary Standards Set of the JIC. He now also serves as a mentor for new Canadian standards project leads, experts and delegates from many industries and organizations and provides standards practices training for Standards Council of Canada staff and other leaders across the Canadian ISO standards leadership and technical committee chair community.
Grant Gillis, Chair of MC/ISO TC215 SC1 Genomics
Grant Gillis’s association on behalf of Canada with ISO/TC 215 Health Informatics began shortly after the committee’s inception in 1998, and he has been a formal member and regular delegate on behalf of Canada ever since. Over this time, he has served several terms as Secretary and then Convenor to the international committee’s WG1 Architecture, Frameworks & Models, as well as working at senior levels on several domestic and international strategic planning and operational initiatives advancing the cause of health informatics internationally, nationally and with several provinces and organization. As a Canadian delegate to ISO, Grant has also contributed to numerous ballot reviews and led several international project teams. Grant is the inaugural Canadian Mirror Committee Chair of Sub-Committee 1 for Genomics Informatics, and supports several Canadian projects at the international level. Grant is currently a Director with Alberta Health Services, focused on the Canadian-first implementation of Epic as the provincial clinical information system.
Committee Members:
Dr. Kelly Abrams, PhD., CHIM
Dr. Kelly Abrams, Ph.D., CHIM is a Standards Council of Canada Mirror Committee representative on ISO/TC215 Health Informatics Working Group 3 - Semantic Content and Working Group 6 – Pharmacy and Medicines Business, and ISO/PC 317 Consumer protection: privacy by design for consumer goods and services. Kelly has over 30 years in health informatics with expertise in workforce transformation, privacy, information management, and data governance. Kelly was also the VP with the Canadian College of Health Information Management and presently, is the privacy and data governance consultant on the University of Regina’s RCMP Longitudinal Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Project.
Craig Anderson
Craig Anderson is Senior Expert, Program Delivery at Health Canada’s Transformation and Business Informatics Division. Craig’s role is focused on representing Health Canada on international IT/IM forums; facilitating the development and implementation of international standards; facilitating delivery of regulatory informatics projects related to electronic product labeling, data governance, automation; and IT modernization/business optimization.
Craig also has over 13 years of pharmaceutical industry experience in regulatory operations and regulatory information management. He has operated as global line manager with staff in Canada, USA and Sweden; with global responsibility for regulatory submission and information management.
Steven Dain, MD, FRCPC
Steven has practiced anesthesiology and perioperative medicine for over 30 years and currently works at several outpatient surgicenters in southwestern Ontario, Canada. He is a retired Associate Professor of Anesthesia and Perioperative Medicine at the Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry. He is an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Waterloo where he lectures in Health Informatics and mentors undergraduate, graduate and post-doc students at the University of Waterloo in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Centre for Bioengineering and Biotechnology. For over 25 years, Dr. Dain has participated in the writing and development of Canadian National and International Standards for medical equipment and design and construction of healthcare facilities. Since January 2018, he is Chair of the Organization for International Standardization (ISO) Technical Committee 121 Anesthetic and respiratory equipment. Dr. Dain has participated in the IEEE 11073 Patient Care Devices Committee, developing medical device communications protocol for anesthesia equipment and critical care ventilators. He is a member of the SNOMED Anesthesia Clinical Reference Group. Dr. Dain is a collaborator in the MD Plug and Play Interoperability Program of the Massachusetts General Hospital in Cambridge, MA and is Senior Medical Advisor, Docbox Inc, Waltham MA USA.
Neil Gardner, MPA
Neil Gardner has a wealth of experience in health informatics, policy and management, serving as CIO for the Ministry of Health in Saskatchewan for several years and having held several senior management positions in the Saskatchewan government including Associate Deputy Minister of Health. Neil has been involved in the foundational health informatics initiatives at the national level in Canada over the past 25 years and has had the unique opportunity of serving as a founding director for both of Canada’s major national agencies in this field - the Canadian Institute for Health Information and Canada Health Infoway. He also served for more than a decade on the Board of Canada’s health informatics professional association (formerly known as COACH, now Digital Health Canada). In his retirement from public service leadership roles, Neil teaches an MHA class in health informatics at the University of Regina and as an active member of Canada’s delegation to TC 215 plays a leadership role in the development of new standards, addressing the need for the safe application of health informatics in enabling continuing improvements in the health of our population.
Andrew Grant, MD, PhD, FRCPC, FACMI
Dr. Andrew Grant is a laboratory physician who has been a member of TC 215 since its inception, when he transferred his standards interests from laboratory diagnostics to standards in the emerging field of Health Informatics. He is based at the Université de Sherbrooke, Québec and directs the research group CRED - Collaboration in research for effective diagnostics, interested especially in the role of informatics and standards to support health innovation. He served on the Infoway standards steering committee 2002-2004 and, on the SNOMED, international technical committee 2007-2011. He developed a web application to support TC 215 standards management which has now evolved to the SKMT Standards Knowledge Management Tool and it supports a coherent international glossary of Health Informatics term definitions which has currently more than 3000 terms www.skmtglossary.org . He has led a standards document TR 13054 (2012) Knowledge management of health information Standards. He has introduced and led standards work on the Clinical data warehouse, publishing 2 standards documents TR 22221 (2006) Good principles and practices for a clinical data warehouse and TS 29585 (2010) Deployment of a clinical data warehouse.
Peter Humphries
Peter Humphries has led large IT and health system related activities across Canada over decades of consulting and leadership in the public and private sectors. He was an elected leader of Canada Health Infoway's IT Privacy and Security Services Standards Collaborative Working Group from its inception and, in addition to professional board of directors’ experience, has served on national and provincial committees, setting standards for national mental health indicators and guiding e-health initiatives. Canadian and international experience in health care, privacy and security inform Peter's contributions the TC 215 Mirror Committee and standards development activities.
Eugene Igras, MMedSc (Neuroscience), MMath
A senior Information Technology Architect and Information Management Consultant with over forty (40) years of experience in the public and private sectors across multiple industries, including high-tech, oil and gas, aerospace and healthcare. Since 1990, Eugene has been involved in the development and integration of Information Technology and Information Management solutions in the healthcare sector in Canada and internationally. Examples include enterprise-wide solutions in Electronic Health Record, Diagnostic Imaging, Laboratory, Pharmacy, Chronic Disease Management, eHealth & Telehealth, Clinical Decision Support, and Information Management solutions. Eugene is a Founder and President of IRIS Systems, a Canadian company that provides advisory, systems engineering and information management services to domestic and international clients. He has been a member of the Canadian ISO/TC 215 and SCC since 2001 and involved in the development and adoption of Electronic Health Record and Medical Imaging standards and guidelines. He has also authored specifications in the area of interoperability of systems and networks.
Heather King
Heather is a licensed Medical Radiation Technologist at the Queensway Carleton Hospital in Ottawa, Ontario. With over 5 years of working experience in the hospital and health care industry, Heather strives to make a lasting impact on her community. In addition to her career, Heather is a mature student completing her bachelor’s in health science.
Heather is a new member to the Standards Council of Canada (SCC) ISO TC 215 Health Informatics Mirror Committee and is excited to share her clinical knowledge. To contribute most effectively, she has joined the Standards Council of Canada pilot mentorship program to learn from a senior member of the SCC.
Clair Kronk, PhD
Dr. Clair Kronk is a postdoctoral fellow in medical informatics at the Yale University School of Medicine. She is the creator of the first LGBTQIA+ controlled vocabulary for usage in health care: the Gender, Sex, and Sexual Orientation ontology, which contains information on over 15,000 terms. She has worked with HL7 International, SNOMED International, Canada Health Infoway, the Trans Metadata Collective, the Homosaurus, and the American Medical Informatics Association Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Task Force in relation to trans and gender-diverse language representation. Clair completed her PhD in 2021 with her dissertation titled Gender, Sex, and Sexual Orientation in Medicine: A Linguistic Analysis.
Helen Lang, MIPH, HBSc
Helen is a Project Manager at CanImmunize. With experience in public health, research, project management, and digital health technologies, Helen has contributed to various projects for the development, implementation, and adoption of digital tools that support clinicians and increase access to care for patients. Her experience includes large-scale implementations in diverse settings such as Electronic Health Record (EHR)-based clinical decision support tools in long-term care homes, digital medication reconciliation solutions in hospitals, and electronic referrals in health clinics across Ontario. Helen is committed to improving population health outcomes through safety and quality standards, advances in patient care and experience, and the continued integration of digital health services into Canada’s healthcare system. She is excited to join the Standards Council of Canada ISO TC 215 to support positive transformation in standardizing data and health informatics.
Frederic Laroche
Helen is a Project Manager at CanImmunize. With experience in public health, research, project management, and digital health technologies, Helen has contributed to various projects for the development, implementation, and adoption of digital tools that support clinicians and increase access to care for patients. Her experience includes large-scale implementations in diverse settings such as Electronic Health Record (EHR)-based clinical decision support tools in long-term care homes, digital medication reconciliation solutions in hospitals, and electronic referrals in health clinics across Ontario. Helen is committed to improving population health outcomes through safety and quality standards, advances in patient care and experience, and the continued integration of digital health services into Canada’s healthcare system. She is excited to join the Standards Council of Canada ISO TC 215 to support positive transformation in standardizing data and health informatics.
Frederic Laroche
Frederic Laroche is a digital health expert with 20 years of IT consulting experience, including more than 16 years in healthcare informatics. His main fields of expertise are: systems integration, interoperability, standards, architecture, advanced data analytics and health information exchange. In his career to date, Frederic has contributed to several large-scale and complex health projects and he played a key role in high-visibility projects for many organizations. Frederic has a solid background both in technology and business and he works with healthcare and life sciences organizations and startups in Canada and internationally.
Frederic has been involved in developing health standards through his work with ISO/TC215 for the last 8 years. Frederic is currently the Canadian lead for WG11 Personalized Digital Health and he’s also part of the AHG5. Previously, Frederic was most active with WG1 dealing with architecture, frameworks and models, with a special focus on the ISO 13606 standard for electronic health record communication. In addition to his involvement with ISO/TC215, Frederic is also an active member of the Canadian standards community, including the Canadian FHIR Implementers Working Group. In the past, Frederic was also an active contributor to several working groups part of the Infoway’s Standards Collaborative (SCWGs). Frederic is also a digital health and health standards guest lecturer at four Canadian universities.
Marion Lyver, MD, FRCP(C), FCFP, CPHIMS-CA
Dr. Marion Lyver is an emergency medicine specialist certified by the Royal College of Physicians & Surgeons and the College of Family Physicians of Canada and an Assistant Clinical Professor at McMaster U in the Faculty of Medicine. She is a well-known, trusted and well-respected digital health and healthcare consultant, providing services in her areas of expertise to both public and private sector organizations provincially, nationally and internationally for over 20 years. Marion has served as a two-term elected Convenor (Chair) of ISO Technical Committee 215 (Health Informatics) - Working Group 8 (EHR Requirements) and Vice-Convenor of WG1 – Architecture, Frameworks & Models, two terms as an elected representative on the IHTSDO (International Health Terminology Standards Development Organization) Implementation & Innovation Committee, two terms as an elected Board member of COACH – Canada’s Health Informatics Association (now Digital Health Canada) and multi-year terms on Canada Health Infoway governance committees – the Standards Collaborative (SC) Strategic Committee and the SC Coordinating Committee. Marion is among those who have received a national peer recognition award from Canada Health Infoway for her work in advancing health informatics standards to improve quality of care and electronic sharing of healthcare data. At present, Marion is a senior associate for a private sector, international health IT advisory and management consulting services corporation, in addition to continuing her private medical practice.
Aaron Middleton
Aaron Middleton is an Executive Managing Partner at Gevity Consulting Inc., one of Canada’s largest health informatics consulting firms. He has more than 26 years of experience working in IM/IT, with 21 years specializing in health information management and digital health. His experience spans roles in enterprise architecture, standards, strategic planning, project management and, software development and design. Aaron has focused much of his health informatics career on establishing effective collaborations in software and standards innovation, development and implementation. He has had the privilege of successfully engaging in several Canadian initiatives at the federal, provincial, and territorial levels, as well as for indigenous organizations, providing his strategic support, advice and architectural services on numerous projects.
Aaron has been an ISO/TC 215 Health Informatics accredited delegate since 2007 and has participated actively on TR 22221 (2006) Good principles and practices for a clinical data warehouse, which evolved to TS 29585 (2010) Deployment of a clinical data warehouse. He also contributed to ISO 21667:2010 Health indicators conceptual framework. Currently, Aaron is Canadian lead on ISO TR 21332 - Cloud computing considerations for health information systems security and privacy. Previously, he provided his expertise as Canada Health Infoway’s Standards Collaborative SCWG #3 – Health System Management Chair (Elected) from 2007 – 2014 and represented CIHI as a voting member of the Standards Collaborative Coordinating Committee of Canada Health Infoway’s Standards Collaborative from 2007-2009.
Michael Nusbaum
Michael Nusbaum is a senior strategist, advisor and thought leader, with more than 35 years of experience devoted exclusively to healthcare. With a background in health services administration and industrial engineering, Michael provides a unique blend of management consulting services to health authorities, governments, hospitals, vendors and professional associations in Canada, the US and around the world. Michael has been actively representing Canada to ISO/TC 215 since 2008, and has served as an elected Vice-Convenor of WG2. Michael continues to participate as a subject matter expert on a number of ISO standards under development, and regularly promotes ISO standards adoption in Canada. Michael concurrently is also the Head of Delegation for IHE International, a “Liaison A” member of ISO/TC 215. Michael is a Past member and Vice-Chair of HIMSS-North America Board, and has been a member of the IHE International Board since its inception.
Ron G. Parker
Ron G. Parker is Principal Consultant, Parker Digital Health Consulting (DHC) Inc. and has 36 years of experience in architecting integrated IT solutions in health and social services enterprises and is currently consulting on Digital Health projects in the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Sri Lanka, focused on Digital Health Enterprise Architecture, and standards-based interoperability. Recently, he was lead and a contributing author on the joint ITU/WHO Digital Health Platform Handbook. As a Fellow of HL7 International, he has over 20 years of participation, and currently he is Chair of HL7 Canada, Co-Chair of the HL7 International Council, and an International Director on the HL7 Board.
Derek Ritz
Derek Ritz is the principal consultant at ecGroup Inc., a Canadian professional services firm that provides advisory services to domestic and international clients regarding digital health strategy, architecture, standards, implementation and adoption. He has been an advisor to national-scale digital health infrastructure projects in Canada and in over a dozen countries in southern Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Derek is a delegate of Canada to ISO/TC 215 (Health Informatics) and is Canada’s official Liaison to the International eHealth standards profiling organization, IHE. In addition to his consulting work, Derek teaches graduate-level courses in health informatics at the University of Edinburgh, has authored and co-authored multiple books and articles on digital health interoperability, and is an active contributor to a donor-funded project, OpenHIE (www.ohie.org), whose mission is to “improve the health of the underserved through the open, collaborative development and support of country driven, large scale health information sharing architectures.”
Sue Schneider, BA, CHIM, CPHIMS-CA
Sue Schneider is Director, Digital Health, at Ontario Health, with 15 years in roles dedicated to health informatics standards, focused on data exchange, data content and terminology standards for provincial digital health information accessibility and interoperability. She has been a participant in World Standards Day celebrations from 2011-19. Sue has over 36 years experience across acute, community and veterinary health settings, and government focused on health information and informatics standards. She has contributed to the development and review of ISO and HL7 standards, has been participant in the TC 215 Mirror Committee for 9 years and is a champion for standards-based solutions that foster customer value. She chairs the Ontario Health Digital Health Interoperability Standards Committee advancing Ontario’s application of health informatics and interoperability standards. Sue is an author, mentor, lecturer, and has awards from Canada Health Infoway and the Canadian Health Information Management Association.
Timothy Wood, RN, BScN, MScN (in progress)
Timothy is an early career researcher working with Health Authorities in British Columbia and collaborating with universities across Canada and internationally. His clinical background as a Registered Nurse has led him to a career in academia with experience primarily in telehealth research and technological integration into healthcare. Work has included the development of a quality indicator measurement system for Health Authorities, a clinical trial to test and implement new health technology for older adults, and standardized clinical information systems. After a work term as a visiting scholar at the Center for Health Services Research in Australia, Timothy joined TC215 Mirror Committee to provide clinical knowledge and telehealth expertise for revision of the TS13131 Telehealth Quality Guidelines. He is also currently completing his thesis on teletrauma utilization in northern British Columbia and plans to further his training in the area of telehealth research at University of Queensland. With a passion to advance equitable access to appropriate health services for all Canadians, Timothy continues to remain involved with various telehealth related projects and regularly guest lectures and sits on panels at the University of Northern British Columbia. He is excited to be apart of the important work that ISO TC215 is apart of to further the quality, equitability, and accessibility of Canada’s health care system with a focus on technology.