Health security & surveillance

Three years embedded in the integration and surveillance backbone that sits between New Zealand's diagnostic labs, general practice, and public health agencies. Initial six-month contract extended four times to cover new system designs and complete redesigns of key national health applications.

• ~$180KAnnual savings, surveillance backend consolidation
• 10–20 min → real-timeNotification latency, national case-event bus
• 4 SADsSigned off through the Solution Alignment Board

Notifiable disease case-event bus

Worked closely with national health architects to design and implement an operational case-event bus for notifiable diseases. Engaged with diagnostic labs nationally to move them to real-time connections, cutting time-to-notification from 10–20 minutes to real time.

STI surveillance pipeline

Architected New Zealand's first fully automated STI surveillance pipeline (Gonorrhoea and Syphilis pilot), writing significant portions of the underlying libraries.

• Cut lab-to-dashboard latency from 90–120 days to as-generated by lab results.
• Reduced clinician data-entry time from 19 to 3 minutes.
• Normalised national lab feeds — reduced 300 unique site codes to 18 via algorithmic mapping while retaining case-level traceability. Integrated deprivation, facility-type, and enrolled-location data, raising record completeness to 76–97%.
• Deployed a case-definition algorithm for Syphilis at a regional diagnostic laboratory; triggered forms only when criteria met, hitting 88% clinician form completion with median < 5 hour turnaround. Consolidated three legacy forms (138–180 fields each) into one smart form (157 fields, 14 auto-populated).
• Implemented advanced patient-privacy controls — dynamic masking, RBAC redaction — across both lab and clinician feeds.
• Standardised HL7 ORU profiles in collaboration with diagnostic labs nationally.

Point-of-care troponin integration

Solution Architect for a national pipeline ingesting and routing high-sensitivity Troponin (hs-TNI) results from point-of-care devices in hospitals directly into national and regional clinical repositories. The first of its kind in New Zealand. Led the technical design of the national point-of-care device platform integration with national and regional clinical repositories and the patient-side immunoassay analyzer; provided significant input on the AWS middleware design and led the implementation with multiple developers — making results available to clinicians in real time, around eight minutes from start of test.

Surveillance platform cloud migration

Led the architectural overhaul and authored the architectural description for the migration of a national disease surveillance platform to cloud — a database refactoring and infrastructural overhaul moving the application into Azure in alignment with NZISM requirements.

Purpose-built HL7 repository

Designed an Azure-resident HL7 repository and middleware platform that reduced reliance on a third-party vendor — taken through to completed Privacy Impact Assessment, Security Risk Assessment, and penetration testing in collaboration with the Enterprise Architect and CISO.

COVID-19 response

Led the design, implementation, and management of large-scale technical solutions for New Zealand's COVID-19 response under tight deadlines and media scrutiny — including PCR eOrdering at the border (with automated sample identification for variant sequencing into the national laboratory repository), self-service Rapid Antigen Testing integration between the national clinical data repository and the public health ministry's COVID record platform, and the integration patterns between regional repositories and the national testing repository for COVID results repatriation.

Event-driven measles reporting

Led an event-driven integration for measles reporting — shaping event contracts and status semantics, and engineering ordered, replayable delivery (DLQ, backoff) while keeping HL7 / ENDMS as MVP and FHIR / SNOMED as the target. Set the national roadmap for lab results to be sent nationally.

Surveillance backend consolidation

Architected an infrastructure consolidation strategy for a surveillance SQL Server backend in response to budget constraints. Analysed a four-node enterprise cluster configuration and designed optimisation options balancing HA requirements with cost reduction. Recommended a phased migration from 8 to 4 application servers and SQL cluster consolidation — delivering ~$180K annual savings while maintaining geographic redundancy between two regional datacentres. Solution included enterprise licence optimisation (4 → 2 licences), storage-tier migration, and managed-services reduction.