IGHPE is very pleased to have Dr. Kathryn Hannah joining us for a podcast episode recorded at our 2018 meeting in Kuala Lumpur. Dr. Hannah, a nurse and a senior health informatics consultant specializing in information management in health environments, presented on the topic of “Standardized clinical terminologies: nursing use in EHRs and big data contexts”. Currently, Dr. Hannah is Health Informatics Advisor to the Canadian Nurses Association and Executive Project Leader of the Canadian Health Outcomes for Better Information and Care (C-HOBIC) project. She also serves as a member of the Senior Advisors Panel for the Office of the Auditor General in the Province of Alberta, and as Adjunct Professor at the University of Victoria’s School of Nursing in Victoria, British Columbia.
In May 2016, Dr. Hannah was awarded the Order of Canada, the country’s highest civilian honor, in recognition of her “pioneering efforts to promote the use of information technology to enhance nursing and health care in Canada and abroad.” She is also a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics (November 1989) and was a recipient of the Maestro Illustre in March 1993 from the Faculty of Medicine and Health Science at the University of Guadalajara in Guadalajara, Mexico. The Canadian Nurses Association awarded Dr. Hannah its prestigious Centennial Award in November 2008. In June 2015, Dr. Hannah received the Canadian Health Informatics Award (CHIA) for Leadership in recognition of outstanding and sustained contributions to health informatics and nursing through leadership, publications, education and mentoring.
In 2018, Dr. Hannah was elected one of 118 founding members of the International Academy of Health Information Sciences. Dr. Hannah is the author of several textbooks and numerous articles on health informatics. She is coeditor of the Health Informatics series (formerly Computers in Healthcare) published by Springer-Verlag. Internationally, Dr. Hannah has served repeatedly as an advisor and consultant to both the World Health Organization and the Pan American Health Organization. In addition, Dr. Hannah has participated actively in the Canadian delegation to the International Organization for Standardization’s Technical Committee 215 on health informatics. She has served as the Canadian Head of Delegation to – and an elected member of – the Standing Committee on Quality at the International Health Terminology Standards Development Organization. Nationally, Dr. Hannah was a member of the Canada Health Infoway Standards Collaborative Strategy Committee and the Standards Collaborative Coordinating Committee that were responsible for coordinating health information standards in Canada.