From the Karratha workshop to the CTO's desk

Mandate

Make clinical and imaging systems resilient enough for a partner-owned practice that now carries an investor's scrutiny and a state reporting contract.

Outcomes

• Retired fax for routine reports; 93 per cent now arrive directly in practice software
• Moved a 1.9-petabyte image archive to Australian-hosted cloud storage with a cache at every clinic
• Made multi-factor sign-in compulsory for portal users after a credential attack
• Introduced AI worklist prioritisation for overnight CT head studies under radiologist oversight

Decisions in context

The CTO role was created in 2021 when the investor's arrival led the board to ask who was accountable for technology risk across the group. I kept the clinical systems team I had led and added infrastructure, cyber security and the service desk. My managers run integration and results delivery, clinical applications, infrastructure and cloud, security, and site support. I spend part of most weeks in clinics, because the effect of a decision shows up at reception desks and reporting stations before it reaches a dashboard. My relationship with the radiologist partners rests on a clear division: their clinical governance committee decides how a tool may be used in care, and I am accountable for whether it works safely and reliably. Each quarter I report cyber risk, incidents and system availability to the audit and risk committee. I am not a director of Corrowyn.

Reason for the move

Current appointment; seeking one non-executive role alongside it.

Mandate

Consolidate the systems inherited through two acquisitions without disrupting reporting.

Outcomes

• Consolidated three PACS into one archive by 2019
• Moved every clinic onto a single RIS by early 2020
• Built the reporting platform for the overnight hospital contract, live in 2018

Decisions in context

Corrowyn hired me from a supplier, which gave me an unusual starting point: I knew where its integration problems lay because my previous team had helped create some of them. The group had acquired two regional practices and inherited their archives and booking systems. Radiologists reporting across sites had to sign into different systems and could not always see a patient's earlier studies. I set a consolidation sequence that started with the archive, because comparison images matter most to reporting quality, and left the RIS until the archive was stable. Each cut-over was scheduled with the radiologists at the affected sites and rehearsed on a weekend. The overnight hospital contract arrived midway, adding a demanding service with contractual turnaround times. Building that platform showed me how differently an emergency department and a general practice experience the same report.

Reason for the move

Appointed CTO when the board created the role after the minority investment.

Mandate

Connect imaging and pathology customers' systems to the practices and hospitals receiving their results.

Outcomes

• Connected fourteen customers' results messaging to their referring practices
• Introduced weekly provider-directory exception reports for customers
• Wrote the company's conformance test set for amended and cancelled reports

Decisions in context

At Telvarra I learnt how results travel once they leave the provider. A message could be technically perfect and still fail: addressed to a doctor who had left, filed by practice software into a folder nobody checked, or rejected silently because a field exceeded its length limit. My early work was building and testing HL7 interfaces; from 2013 I managed the Western Australian implementation team. I insisted that every go-live include a sample of real amended and cancelled reports, because those were the messages most likely to confuse a recipient. Customers bought software from us, but what they needed was confidence that each report reached a clinician. The difference between delivering a product and delivering an outcome became uncomfortable for me. When Corrowyn asked me to join, I wanted accountability for the whole path rather than for one link in it.

Reason for the move

Joined Corrowyn, a customer, to take responsibility for outcomes rather than implementations.

Mandate

Replace film with digital archiving and reporting in three hospital imaging departments.

Outcomes

• Completed the move from film to PACS across three hospitals by 2007
• Introduced rehearsed downtime procedures before go-live
• Connected the RIS to the hospitals' patient administration system

Decisions in context

The move to digital imaging was my first experience of changing clinical work rather than repairing equipment. Radiographers had to learn new quality checks, radiologists new reading stations and ward staff a new way to view images. The technical project turned out to be the smaller part. The harder questions were operational: which earlier studies needed to be ready before a list began, who was told when a report was amended, and what happened when the archive was unavailable during an emergency. We wrote downtime procedures with the radiographers and rehearsed them before go-live, and twice in the first year a real outage tested them. My team of four supported the systems day to day. By 2010 the hospitals were stable, and I had become curious about the half of the problem I could not see: what happened to reports once they left the building.

Reason for the move

Moved to a software supplier to work on how results reach clinicians outside the hospital.

Mandate

Keep imaging equipment in remote hospitals and practices working, with fewer and shorter outages.

Outcomes

• Cut average CT repair time in the region from three days to just over one by holding critical parts locally
• Introduced repair logs shared with each hospital's radiographers
• Trained two engineers to work unsupervised across the region

Decisions in context

Working from Karratha meant that a failed scanner could be eight hours' drive or a charter flight away. I learnt to plan for the failure that had not yet happened: which parts to hold locally, which faults a radiographer could describe by telephone, and which hospitals had no fallback if their only CT unit stopped. Holding critical parts in the region cost the company more in inventory but shortened repairs considerably, and the hospitals noticed. I trained two younger engineers and wrote repair logs that radiographers could read, so the next person knew what had been done. The work also showed me the limits of my role. I could restore a machine in a day, yet the images still travelled to Perth by plane for reporting. That gap between a working scanner and a timely result drew me towards systems rather than hardware.

Reason for the move

Joined a hospital group to work on digital imaging rather than the equipment alone.

Mandate

Learn to maintain X-ray, CT, mammography and ultrasound equipment safely under supervision.

Outcomes

• Completed manufacturer training on three CT models
• Carried out electrical-safety and preventive-maintenance testing at about forty sites
• Took on independent breakdown calls from the second year

Decisions in context

My first employer gave me a clear apprenticeship. For the first year I worked alongside senior engineers on preventive maintenance and electrical-safety testing, and I was not permitted to sign off a repair on my own. Later I handled breakdown calls across Perth hospitals and private radiology practices. The discipline was practical: diagnose before replacing, record what you did, and tell the radiographer honestly when the machine would be back. Radiographers became my best teachers, because they could describe a fault by what it did to an image and to a patient's examination. I also learnt to respect the regulatory weight of the equipment; radiation safety and manufacturer procedures were not shortcuts to skip on a busy day. When the company needed someone to lead its northern region, I volunteered, partly because remote work offered responsibility far earlier than Perth would have.

Reason for the move

Promoted to the senior role in the northern region.