Atomica Informatics offers independent health informatics expertise, specialising in atomic data design, clinical modelling and clinician engagement.

who?

Dr Heather Leslie

MD, FRACGP, FAIDH, FIAHSI, GAICD

Heather is an experienced clinician and health informatician.

For the past 25 years her focus has always been how a clinical informatician can bridge between non-technical clinicians and the software engineers – ensuring that the clinical needs and requirements are accurately understood by technicians and implementers. Her motivation has been to use technology as a tool to try to make a greater impact on health outcomes than could be achieved through direct clinical practice alone.

In her various volunteer roles at the openEHR Foundation since 2006, she pioneered the practical development of the openEHR modelling methodology as a lingua franca between the clinicians and engineers, and designed and developed specialised tooling and governance processes to support the methodology. This approach has now been adopted by national programs, international organisations and vendors, and is being further refined as it gathers momentum and adoption.

She is currently the co-lead of the Clinical Program at the openEHR Foundation. After 13 years of evangelising the openEHR clinical modelling approach on behalf of the openEHR Foundation, the openEHR CKM has a community of nearly 2000 registered members from 87 countries and a library of more than 400 archetypes in varying stages of publication. More importantly she has developed a  'train the trainer' approach and demonstrated that the approach is sustainable and transferable to others, such as the Archetype program at Norway's Nasjonal IKT.

When Heather commenced her clinical modelling role at Ocean Informatics/Ocean Health Systems in 2004 there was only one archetype in existence - the notorious Blood Pressure archetype that is still commonly used to introduce everyone else to the art of archetyping! Heather has either authored or been an Editor for most of the archetypes available on the openEHR CKM. As a result of early collaboration with the NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT) program in 2007, the need for a tool to underpin archetype collaboration and governance was identified. Heather was product manager for Ocean's Clinical Knowledge Manager (CKM) tool from it's inception in 2007 until 2018, and now in use as an foundation 'infostructure' resource in several national eHealth programs. 

Since 2007, Heather has run more than 60 clinical modelling introductory and advanced training courses and workshops on most continents - for national/jurisdictional eHealth programs, organisations and vendors.

While Heather's experience has been largely focused on the specifics of the openEHR approach to data, her unique skill set is transportable to many aspects of the eHealth environment:

• a clinician informatician for more than 20 years experience in clinical system design for hospital, primary care and personal health records;

• a proven track record in design and clinical verification of atomic health data and data set specifications across a variety of clinical domains;

• a deep understanding of clinical knowledge governance learned at the coal face of building the only tool available for the purpose; and

• practical experience in successful engagement of clinicians and other domain experts.

Where?

Heather lives in Melbourne, Australia but works wherever she has her computer and an internet connection!