David Zitner
MD, FCFP
Dr. David Zitner has participated at every level of Canadian health care including clinical practice, research, administration, governance and patient and professional education. He cared for patients in an active Nova Scotia family medicine practice that included obstetrics, emergency department care, and caring for hospitalized patients. He was a member of the Federal Provincial Territorial Deputy Ministers task force and co‐author of their report titled "When Less is Better: Using Canada's Hospitals Efficiently". The report advised health organizations to use timely data about health outcomes and access to evaluate care and guide changes to clinical and administrative practice.
Subsequently, Dalhousie University Faculty of Medicine recruited and appointed him as Professor and Founding Director of the Medical Informatics program. He continued clinical practice and was instrumental in starting the first Canadian graduate program in health informatics a unique collaboration between the Faculties of Medicine, Management and Computer Science.
He served on the governing bodies of Accreditation Canada, the Canadian College of Family Physicians, and Doctors Nova Scotia. He was President of the Nova Scotia Chapter of the College of Family Physicians of Canada. He served on the Health Economics Committee for the Canadian Medical Association and the Physician Advisory Committee to the Canadian Institute for Health Information. He advised the Federal Auditor General’s office as they attempted to develop a value for money audit of Canadian health information systems.
He was one of the Founding board members and an early investor and developer of Health Connex, a project of the Nova Scotia Cooperative Council. The software was sold to a national pharmacy chain.
Dr. Zitner publishes in the academic press, newspapers and magazines. He was a coauthor of the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies Fisher prize winning papers “Operating in the Dark” and “Definitely Not the Romanow Report”. His comments on health care including mental health have been published in the Globe and Mail, National Post, Canadian Medical Association Journal and Canadian Family Physician.
He is completing, with Dominic Covvey, a 3‐volume book project describing the fundamental ideas in clinical care that are important for anyone including journalists, lawyers, government health departments, health system administrators and clinical professionals.
H. Dominic Covvey
Dominic Covvey was a professor, and the founding director of the Waterloo Institute for Health Informatics Research (WIHIR) at the University of Waterloo (UW) and is currently the President and Director of the National Institutes of Health Informatics (NIHI). He held appointments at UW in the Faculties of Science (Biology), Engineering (Electrical) and Mathematics (Computer Science), and in the Schools of Pharmacy and Optometry. He served as the NSERC/Agfa Executive Industrial Research Chair for 3 years at UW. He has been involved in Health Informatics education, research and services for over 55 years.
His research was in the areas cardiovascular mechanics, clinical information systems, and in the representation, analysis and evaluation of workflow in healthcare settings, the economics of IT in the health system and the definition of Health Informatics competencies and curricula.
Dominic worked for 15 years in the Canadian hospital system (1968‐1984), mostly as a funded applied researcher (senior research fellow) and as an assistant professor in Medicine and Computer Science at the University of Toronto. He has also been a lecturer at the University of Western Ontario, and an assistant professor at the Universities of Victoria, Manitoba and the U. of Ontario Institute of Technology.
After leaving the hospital environment, he had 15 years' full‐time consulting experience, having established and managed several consulting services companies. He served in hundreds of IT‐related consulting projects in the U.S. and Canada. His consulting specialties included Systems Integration in laboratory consortia, process re‐engineering, strategic planning, information systems audit, management education, and innovative approaches to procurement. He provided these services to government agencies, hospitals, clinics, laboratories, and corporations.
Dominic has been a principal investigator or co‐grantee on projects funded by the Natural Science Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR), the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Canada Health Infoway, the Ontario Heart foundation, CITO/OCE, the Ontario Ministry of Health, National Health and Welfare, Canarie, the U.S. FDA, and several companies and agencies. He has published 11 books, 9 book chapters, and about 500 papers and abstracts, and he has been a frequent speaker at international Health Informatics conferences. He served in the past as a member of the editorial board of the electronic Journal of Health Informatics and an editor of Health Care Information Management and Communications Canada.
Dominic is also a curriculum developer and teacher. He initiated and led the UW Graduate Specialization Program in Health Informatics, taught graduate courses, supervised Masters and PhD students, and was the developer/director of the Bootcamp in Applied Health Informatics sponsored by WIHIR and NIHI.
Dominic was born in Philadelphia and received his B.A. from the University of Wisconsin (Madison, Physics and Astronomy). He received his M.Sc. from the University of Toronto in Medical Biophysics. He is a fellow of American College of Medical Informatics (FACMI), of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (FHIMSS), and of the Canadian Information Processing Society (FCIPS), a Senior Member of the IEEE, and a member of ACM, ACMI, AMIA, CCS (Canadian Cardiovascular Society), and CIPS. He was a member of COACH and CHIMA. He is a retired CIPS‐certified Information Technology Certified Professional.