A repaired scanner and a four-day wait for the report

The CT scanner at a Pilbara hospital failed on a Saturday afternoon in 1999. I drove from Karratha, replaced a power supply by early evening and watched the radiographer image the patient who had been waiting since lunchtime. Then the films went into a satchel for Monday's flight to Perth. The report came back by fax on Wednesday. I had fixed the machine, and the patient still waited four days for an answer that mattered to the doctor treating her. Most of my career since has been an attempt to close that interval without pretending that technology closes it alone.

I studied electrical and electronic engineering at Belvarra University, finishing in December 1995, and joined Pemberlow Medical Engineering in February 1996. Pemberlow maintained X-ray, CT, mammography and ultrasound equipment under contract for hospitals and private practices. My first years were in Perth, working under senior engineers on preventive maintenance, electrical-safety testing and breakdown calls. In 2000 I moved north as the senior engineer for the region, responsible for equipment from Port Hedland to Broome and for contract visits to Darwin and Alice Springs. Distance taught me to carry the likely part, to document every repair for the next engineer and to ask the radiographer what the failure had cost that day's patients.

In 2004 I joined Arbelline Private Hospitals in Perth as PACS and RIS manager. The three hospitals were replacing film with digital image archiving, and I led that change in their imaging departments. Radiographers and radiologists had decades of habits built around film. The hard part was not storing images but agreeing what happened when the system was down, which earlier studies had to be on screen before reporting began and who was told when a report was corrected. We wrote downtime procedures before go-live and rehearsed them, which proved useful twice in the first year.

Telvarra Health Software recruited me in 2010. It sold radiology information systems and a results-messaging product to imaging and pathology providers, and I led integration in its Perth office, later managing Western Australian implementations. Here I saw the other side of results delivery: messages built correctly but addressed to a doctor who had left the practice, provider numbers recorded against the wrong location, and practice software that filed a result where nobody looked. My team of nine connected fourteen customers to thousands of referring practices. I learnt to treat the provider directory as clinical infrastructure rather than administration.

Corrowyn Imaging, one of those customers, asked me to join in May 2016 as general manager of clinical and imaging systems. It had acquired two regional practices and was running three PACS and two RIS. Over five years we consolidated them into one archive and one RIS across what became 37 clinics, and built the reporting platform for an overnight contract with nine regional public hospitals. The radiologist partners were exacting clients. They expected the right comparison studies, display layouts that matched their habits and no change on a Monday morning without warning.

I became chief technology officer in July 2021, when the role was created after the investor's minority holding prompted a review of technology risk. I report to the chief executive, attend each audit and risk committee meeting to report on cyber security and system resilience, and present investment proposals to the board. I am not a director of Corrowyn. Since 2022 I have been an unpaid director of Tindarra Hospice Care, a Perth not-for-profit, where I sit on its finance, audit and risk committee.

My leadership habits come from field work. I visit clinics without an agenda, usually starting with the reception desk and the radiographers' queue, because that is where a system's failures become patients' delays. I want my managers to describe a problem by its effect on a referrer or a patient before naming the product involved. I also expect them to disagree with me in writing when a decision affects clinical work, so the radiologists' clinical governance committee sees both views.

The three cases on this site concern the final stretch of the imaging service. Retiring fax meant upsetting some loyal referrers. Closing our portal after a credential attack inconvenienced thousands of legitimate users. Restricting an AI tool to reordering the overnight worklist cost us a discount and a marketing message. In each case the radiologist partners retained clinical authority, and in each I can name what I would do differently.

A Master of cyber security, completed part-time in 2019, gave me better vocabulary for the threats we face, but the habit that matters more is older. I still ask what happens to the patient while the system is broken. A board seat would test that habit in a different organisation, and I would expect to learn its service before offering conclusions drawn from mine.

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