Terry Hannan, MD

A physician by training, Dr. Terry Hannan has emerged as a leader of the informatics community in Australia. His fascination with the field led to his involvement, from 1984 through 1992, as Medical Manager of the project involved in the international transfer and implementation of the wellknown Johns Hopkins Oncology System in an oncology center in Sydney. He faced the challenges of rebuilding the data dictionaries to meet the needs of the Australian practice environment, and he made several similar adaptations that led to the successful implementation and continued use of the system. His subsequent immersion in the field led to his role as an advisor on Computer Affairs to the Education Committee of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians and to publications on adverse drug reaction detection, quality assurance, variation in health care, and the status of the EMR in Australia. He has taught numerous workshops on informatics topics, often working with American colleagues who are ACMI fellows. Dr. Hannan was founding President of the Health Informatics Association of New South Wales, and he has served as a representative of the College of Physicians on the Standards Australia HL7 Committees involved in the implementation of HL7 as a national Australian standard for health care there. More recently, he has worked as cofounder of the first ambulatory EMR in Sub-Saharan Africa (a joint project with Bill Tierney and others). The work on building an electronic medical record system in Kenya is just now being disseminated, yet a series of government-run health centers in Namibia has asked for and received a copy of their HIV module as an EMR for those clinics. Dr. Hannan brings to ACMI a clinicianís perspective and a strongly positive vision of the possibilities that lie ahead as informatics systems further penetrate practice settings throughout the developing and developed world