COURSE FACULTY
Dr William Hersh
(Course Lecturer and Tutor)
Professor and Chair, Dept of Medical Informatics and
Clinical Epidemiology, Oregon Health and Science University, USA
William Hersh, M.D., is Professor
and Chair of the Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical
Epidemiology in the School of Medicine at Oregon Health &
Science University (OHSU) in Portland, Oregon, USA. Dr. Hersh
is a leader and innovator in biomedical informatics both in
education and research.
In education, Dr. Hersh serves as Director of Informatics
Educational Programs at OHSU, where he has led the development
of educational programs at the certificate, master’s, and
doctoral levels. He also initiated OHSU’s efforts into distance
learning for biomedical informatics. Most recently, he teamed
up with the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) to
launch the 10x10 program that aims to train 10,000 clinicians
and others in informatics by the year 2010.
In research, Dr. Hersh’s main
focus has been in the area of information retrieval, where he
has authored over 100 scientific papers as well as the book,
Information Retrieval: A Health & Biomedical Perspective.
Dr. Hersh is also active in clinical and translational research
informatics. He serves as Director of the Biomedical Informatics
Program of the Oregon Clinical & Translational Research
Institute (OCTRI, www.octri.org) and is Chair of the National
Informatics Steering Committee of the Clinical & Translational
Science Award (CTSA) program of the National Institutes of
Health.
More information
about Dr. Hersh can be found on his Web site at
www.billhersh.info
Dr K C Lun (Course Coordinator and Tutor)
Dr K C Lun is a pioneer of medical
informatics in Asia. Since presenting his first scientific
paper at MEDINFO 86 in Washington DC, his accomplishments in the
field include hosting the financially successful World Congress
of Health and Medical Informatics, MEDINFO 89 in Singapore in
1989, chairing the Editorial Committee for MEDINFO 92 in Geneva,
founding the Asia Pacific Association for Medical Informatics (APAMI)
in 1994 and assuming the IMIA Presidency in 2001. For 26
years, Dr Lun served on the NUS Faculty of Medicine and held
positions as Director of the NSTB (now A-STAR)-funded Medical
Informatics Research Programme (1996-2001) and Director of the
World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Health
Informatics (1990-2001). His pioneering efforts in medical
e-learning at NUS won him the Teaching Excellence Award
in 1998. He is also credited as the creator of Cyberspace
Hospital, the first virtual hospital on the World Wide Web,
launched in 1995. In 2001, he left NUS to join the Nanyang
Technological University to help start its School of Biological
Sciences, serving as its founding Vice-Dean (Academic) and
later, NTU Dean of Admissions in 2005.
Dr Lun has undertaken
consultancies in biostatistics and health informatics for WHO,
IMIA, IDRC, UNDP and several other international agencies. He
has also served as Editor (Asia Pacific) of the International
Journal of Medical Informatics as well as editorial board
member of the IJMI and Methods of Information in
Medicine.
For his contributions to the
development of medical informatics nationally and
internationally, Dr Lun was awarded the Singapore
Internationale Award in 2001 and the Excellence for
Singapore Award in 2002. After a rewarding career in
academia spanning over 30 years, Dr Lun set up Gateway
Consulting in October 2006 to keep himself active in retirement.
More information
about Dr. Lun can be found on his Web site at
www.gatewaypl.com/lun
Dr Low Cheng Ooi (Course Tutor)
Chairman, Medical Board, Changi
General Hospital and Chairman, EMR Steering Committee, Singapore
Health Services.
An
orthopaedics surgeon by training, Dr Low Cheng Ooi belongs to the
generation of clinicians who handled the very first PCs in the
final year of medical school. He was fascinated to discover
that he could input clinical data into a rudimentary database on
his PC to analyse trends and results without using punch cards
and huge mainframes.
Being the chairman of the SingHealth’s Electronic Medical
Records Steering Committee, he is also an advocate of the
various medical informatics initiatives and spends extra hours
to help fellow clinicians understand and use the new
applications.
Dr Low sees the need to have full time medical informatics
professionals. In ensuring good outcomes for their patients
today, clinicians are now increasingly dependent on their
computers and PDAs as much as their stethoscopes and surgical
knives. He has completed the AMIA 10x10 training program
on medical informatics as he sees medical informatics to be an
important domain knowledge for medical practitioners to acquire
in the coming years.
Dr Colin Quek (Course Tutor)
Vice President (Operations), Singapore HealthPartners
Dr
Colin Quek, a medical doctor by training, has been working
in the healthcare IT industry for more than 16 years. He is
presently Vice President (Operations) at Singapore
HealthPartners who are developing the Connexion complex, an
integrated healthcare facility comprising a private tertiary
hospital and specialist medical centre and a luxury hotel.
His previous
appointments include the roles of Chief Information Officer
(CIO) at the Raffles Medical Group (RMG), a private
integrated healthcare delivery network in Singapore as well
as at the National Healthcare Group (NHG), a public
integrated healthcare delivery network in Singapore. He has
also spent time working as the Programme Director for
Information Services and the Senior Executive Programme at
the Institute of Systems Science (ISS), National University
of Singapore. His early work centred around the development
and implementation of electronic medical record systems
before embarking on his IT management career as the CIO of
the Tan Tock Seng Hospital. As CIO of NHG, he took the
organisation through an IT consolidation exercise involving
the consolidation of IT resources, infrastructure
rebuilding, service outsourcing and application
consolidation. His stint as CIO of Raffles Medical Group
gave him valuable insight into healthcare IT delivery in the
private healthcare setting. The University stint involved
teaching and consulting in the area of Business Process
Re-engineering and other IT management topics. He was
involved in the development of the Senior Executive
Programme in ISS and also ran the IT department in ISS.
In his present role,
he is responsible for the medical operationalisation and
general operations of the Connexion complex which seeks to
bring new levels of service and care delivery to patients,
particularly for the regional medical tourist.
