Michelle Honey

Honorary Member since 2022

Michelle has been active in nursing informatics in New Zealand since 1991, with the original Nursing Informatics New Zealand (NINZ) organization, taking various leadership roles across the years. She is an honorary HiNZ member as well as IMIA NI where she is currently vice chair for communication. She is a founding HiNZ fellow and in 2022 was elected as a Fellow of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics (FIAHSI). Michelle supports the continued development of nursing and midwifery health informatics in New Zealand. She currently works at the University of Auckland in the School of Nursing where she continues her research, publications and support of nursing students. She is a prolific author and a mentor for many students in the field of informatics.

Lucy Westbrooke
Honorary Members since 2022

Lucy was instrumental in the establishment of HiNZ and the NMI group in 2000, and has been a leader in this field. She is a long term informatician and continues to work in a digital health role as a clinical informatics specialist in data and digital at Te Whatu Ora.

Robyn Carr
Honorary Member since 2022

Robyn Carr has a long history in informatics in New Zealand, both clinically and in leadership roles, since the 1980’s. She has contributed to policy, literature, projects and other initiatives in digital health. She is an inspiration and a mentor and was one of the inaugural members of the HiNZ-NMI group, establishing this in 1991.

Deb Boyd

Honorary Member since 2023

Deb is the CEO of Ormiston Surgical and Endoscopy and has been a member of the HiNZ board since 2016, as well as the HiNZ-NMI executive. She is a champion for all things digital health as well as a mentor to others emerging in the field.

Angela de Zwart
Honorary Member since 2023

Angela has been a RN and working in digital health for many years. She strives to advocate for nurses, as providers of healthcare, users of clinical solutions but also as an untapped resource for driving innovation in digital technologies. She has a strong interest in data: being captured and displayed in a way that provides meaningful insights, and utilised to improve equity and health service outcomes.

Sally Britnell
Honorary Member since 2024

I have a diverse clinical and digital health background. For example, as a Registered Nurse (RN), Ambulance Officer (AO), Academic and Informatician. One of the skills I pride myself in is communicating effectively with people from many backgrounds and acting as a bridge between practice, management and industry. For example, when working in an Emergency Department, as a Practice Nurse in Glen Innes and as an AO, clients were diverse and often from deprived areas of our community where English was not their first language. These roles have taught me adaptability, problem-solving, resilience, and strength and showed me the importance of valuing everyone and the need to change my communication and behaviour to match a situation and people.

My Current work is as an Academic teaching nursing at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels with a particular interest in teaching informatics, innovation and communication. This role has included strategic planning, curriculum design, content development, public speaking and leadership with over 180 students and 15 staff to manage at any time. Similarly, I have worked in developing policy at a School level and been part of a team who developed Guidelines: Informatics for Nurses Entering Practice.

My friends often call me a geek - I have a passion for innovation and hold a PhD in Computer Science (Health Informatics). I am working on two projects in this area. One involves computer vision and remotely measuring children for ongoing care (such as Plunket visits). The other involves working with bio-engineers to develop a guide dog harness that is individualised to both dog and handler (at present, we are investigating 3D printing to achieve this).

As a disabled woman who works with a guide dog, I am keenly interested in Accessibility in Health Informatics. I have several projects in progress in this area, investigating mobile accessibility (non-web-based) guidelines, investigating the disparity in funding and experience obtaining assistive technology between ACC and MSD as well as investigating the convergence of assistive and mainstream technology. My work in this area as an influencer, providing feedback on policy coupled with my diverse background, has led me to become an Invited Expert for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which is responsible for the design and upkeep of accessibility guidelines. In particular, I work with the Mobile Accessibility Task Force looking at accessibility in a non-web-based environment.

Karen Day
Honorary Member since 2024

Karen first used computers as a student nurse in 1980 when an admission, transfer and discharge information system had been installed at the Johannesburg Hospital (in South Africa). It took her Master of Arts in Managed Care, followed by the design of an information system for a Health Maintenance Organisation for a Mining House in South Africa for her to realise that she was doing health informatics work. She obtained a PhD in Information Systems in 2007 on the link between change management and health information systems implementation.

She has been an academic in digital health (health informatics) since 2005 and has published on consumer informatics, telehealth, mental health, the digitisation of the aged care workforce, and the digital health specialist workforce. She continues to teach on aspects of the field, supervise PhD and Masters students, conduct research on the digital health specialist workforce, and mentor students and colleagues. She has held leadership roles in digital health teaching and research, served on the HiNZ Board, been associate editor for three digital health journals, and designed and taught New Zealand’s first nursing informatics course at Massey University.

Karen continues to champion nursing informatics and the specialist digital health workforce, both being the most important (in her view) of the health workforce of the future.