FHINZ Profile – Peter Jordan

FHiNZ PROFILE - Peter Jordan, secretary HL7NZ

Describe your career to date and how that led you to be a Fellow of HiNZ?
My digital health journey began when I emigrated to New Zealand from the UK 30 years ago and spent most of the 90s as the co-developer of a Practice Management System. This included work on our first HL7^® messaging solutions and clinical terminologies. Subsequently, I’ve contracted to suppliers of both primary and secondary care applications and various public sector organisations. Probably the most significant work I’ve done in recent years has been in developing and supporting interoperability components for national systems such as GP2GP and NZePS; plus, the provision of an HL7^® FHIR Server^® for community use. I’ve also had the privilege of holding several voluntary, elected, governance positions in standards development organisations – both locally and internationally.

What does being nominated and accepted as a Fellow mean to you?
Without wishing to appear churlish, in general I’m not a great advocate for individual awards in this field, particularly as my primary focus area is interoperability which is very much a collective endeavour. Naturally, it’s pleasing to be recognised by one’s peers, but I regard my Fellowship as a tribute to the Standards Community as a whole and HL7 New Zealand in particular. Every successful digital health project that I’ve been fortunate enough to be part of has been underpinned by the implementation of standards.

What is your advice to other digital health specialists who are thinking of nominating themselves or others?
Health informatics is the convergence of clinical and technical folk. As someone on the latter side of that cohort, I would encourage other implementers to be considered or self-nominate. Maybe, I’m a little over-sensitive on this topic, but I do feel that technicians are sometimes undervalued by clinical informaticians, and the HiNZ Fellowship Community should be place which facilitates a closer understanding between different digital health disciplines. Certainly, lack of either a medical or technical background shouldn’t be a barrier, although it’s useful to have one of those!

What’s your favourite piece of technology at home and why?
As I work predominantly from home, it would have to be our fibre broadband connection – my digital front door to the world beyond Hamilton! It’s also a technology with which I have a tenuous, but interesting association. Unbeknownst to me at the time, the pioneering work in creating fibre optics as a telecommunications medium was performed in the 1960s, by Sir Charles Kao at Standard Telecommunication Laboratories based in Harlow, Essex, England, literally on the other side of the fence to my school’s playing fields.


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