Harriet MontgomeryChief Technology Officer

Personal correspondence

Measured where the referring doctor reads the report

Chief Technology Officer Australia

An imaging service is finished only when the doctor who requested the scan can find, trust and act on its 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.

A diagnostic image has no value until a doctor reads the report and acts on it. Technology choices in imaging should be judged at that point: whether the request arrived complete, whether the radiologist had the right earlier studies, and whether the result reached the right clinician quickly and privately. The radiologist owns the report; I own the path it travels.

Group revenue
A$231m
FY2025; radiologist-owned imaging group
Examinations a year
1.15m
FY2025, across clinics, hospital departments and overnight reporting
Reports delivered into practice software
93%
Since September 2023, up from 58 per cent in mid-2022

I judge imaging technology by whether the referring doctor receives, trusts and can act on the report, not by what the scanner or the archive can do.

I am chief technology officer of Corrowyn Imaging, a Perth medical-imaging group owned by its radiologist partners with a minority healthcare investor. We run 37 community clinics across Perth and regional Western Australia, imaging departments in two private hospitals and an overnight reporting service for nine regional public hospitals. In FY2025 we performed about 1.15 million examinations and earned A$231 million. I lead 68 employees and 15 contractors through five managers, with an operating budget of A$18.4 million and capital of A$7.9 million this year. Radiologists own every report; my team owns the systems that carry the request in and the result out.

I started in 1996 as a field engineer repairing X-ray and CT equipment, and spent four years based in Karratha covering hospitals across the Pilbara, the Kimberley and the Northern Territory. Some nights I restored a scanner for a waiting patient, then watched the films wait for a flight to Perth and the report come back by fax days later. The machine had worked. The service had not. Hospital PACS management, six years with a results-messaging software company and ten years at Corrowyn have all returned me to that gap between acquiring an image and acting on it.

The decisions on this site concern that last stretch. We retired fax for routine reports and kept a compulsory telephone call for urgent findings. We took our referrer portal offline for twenty-nine hours after a credential attack and reopened it only behind multi-factor sign-in. We allowed software to reorder the overnight CT worklist without allowing it to declare any scan normal. Each choice cost money, convenience or a colleague's preferred plan, and each is described with what I would now change.

Reports now arrive inside the GP's own software

Between July 2022 and September 2023 the share of reports delivered by secure message into practice software rose from 58 to 93 per cent across about 1,900 referring practices. Misdirected-report incidents fell from 31 in FY2022 to six in FY2024.

A portal closed rather than left exposed

Fourteen referrer accounts were misused with passwords reused from breaches elsewhere. We notified affected patients and Australia's privacy regulator, spent about A$720,000 on the response and reopened only after every active user had enrolled in multi-factor sign-in.

Software reorders the night list; radiologists read every scan

For CT head scans from nine regional hospitals, the median time to a signed report for confirmed bleeds fell from 52 to 21 minutes in the first nine months. We declined the vendor's wider licence and its offer to defer reading of studies it considered normal.

Current focus

I am moving the remaining clinic-based modality workstations onto segmented networks with supported operating systems, and agreeing with the radiologist partners how much image history each clinic must hold locally if the cloud archive becomes unreachable.

Conversations I welcome

I would consider one non-executive role with a healthcare-services or care provider where patient information sits at the centre of the service, allowing twenty-four days a year, after my chief executive's consent and a review of our vendor and referrer relationships.

The leadership record

Trusted with consequential decisions.

In the boardroom

  • Tindarra Hospice CareNon-executive director (unpaid) · 2022–present

Formation

  • Bachelor of engineering (electrical and electronic)Belvarra University · 1995
  • Master of cyber security (part-time)Belvarra University · 2019
Harriet brought the AI proposal to us as a clinical question before anyone had signed anything. When validation showed weaker results on two hospitals' scanners, she excluded them and absorbed the delay herself.
Joanna PellicottRadiologist partner and chair of the clinical governance committee, Corrowyn Imaging
The full record ↗

Contact

I would consider one non-executive role with a healthcare-services or care provider where patient information sits at the centre of the service, allowing twenty-four days a year, after my chief executive's consent and a review of our vendor and referrer relationships.

  • Board appointments
Write to Harriet Contact page