Angela de Zwart wins HiNZ award and elected new Chair of NISIG

We’re thrilled to congratulate Angela de Zwart (RGON, MPH), Principal Clinical Consultant for Orion Health who has been awarded The Robyn Carr Cup for Excellence in Nursing Informatics, presented at the Health Informatics New Zealand (HiNZ) Conference in Wellington last week.

The cup has been awarded since 2010 to encourage and recognise nurses in the informatics field who are advancing the goals and ongoing achievements of nursing informatics. Robyn Carr is one of five nurses who organised the first nursing informatics conference in New Zealand in 1991. Shortly after, she became the World Chair of the International Medical Informatics Association Nursing Informatics Special Interest Group.

Angela is described as an advocate for clinicians in digital health solutions, supporting user workflow and transforming healthcare delivery. She has been with Orion Health for 14 years, during which she has been involved in several projects in Spain, Vietnam, North America, Australia and New Zealand. Angela has 30 years’ experience as a registered nurse and until recently was still practicing on a casual basis as an emergency department nurse.

Angela is also the new Chair of the recently renamed and realigned HiNZ Nursing Informatics Special Interest Group (HiNZ-NI). The purpose of the group is to encourage nurses to engage with health informatics and with HiNZ, and to provide advice to the HINZ Board on how best to maximise engagement with the New Zealand nursing community.

Angela’s interest in nursing informatics started in the 90s when she completed one of the first postgraduate nursing informatics courses available in New Zealand at Manukau Institute of Technology. Angela also has a strong interest in user experience design, clinical safety and coding, especially capturing data in a way that in can be used to inform clinical practice. This interest in data capture comes from a background in health-related research in injury prevention, health literacy and emergency medicine.

Her dedication to improving the way clinicians deliver care is evident in the value she brings to making sure our products, especially Clinical Portal and Consult, are aligned with clinicians’ needs as well as health organisations’ objectives. A key focus for Angela in her work is on improving clinician workflow but also the safety of solutions through careful attention to usability, workflow design and change management.

The eHealth Nursing event at HiNZ was held on Wednesday 21 November with presentations from notable speakers including Judy Murphy, Chief Nursing Officer at IBM Global Healthcare who spoke about the importance of leveraging current digital technologies to enable multi-disciplinary care teams to put the patient at the centre of their care, and to provide more personalised and cost-effective care.