Digital health advisory for health-system boards and executives
Independent advice for the leaders who carry the accountability: EMR investment and readiness, program assurance and recovery, cyber readiness and continuity, and the governance of data, interoperability and AI. Former CIO and CDO judgement, without a delivery team to sell.
The decisions this service is built for
Digital health is where the largest sums, the highest clinical stakes and the longest-lived commitments meet. The board that gets these decisions right rarely makes headlines. The board that gets them wrong always does.
- An EMR business case you cannot fully test before signature, with numbers built by the people who benefit from a yes.
- A digital health program tracking red, and assurance reports that reassure the board without informing it.
- Clinical services exposed to downtime with no rehearsed continuity plan for the day the system is not there.
- Data, analytics and interoperability ambitions with no governance to make them safe, lawful or real.
- A vendor, procurement or contract decision too consequential to take on the vendor's word.
Six places an independent eye earns its fee
Senior-led, always. Pick the entry point that fits where you are.
EMR strategy, business cases and readiness
Independent scrutiny of the investment case, the vendor path and whether your infrastructure, data, workforce and governance are actually ready. The costs that sink these programs surface early, not at go-live.
Run the EMR Pre-MortemIndependent program assurance and recovery
Board-level scrutiny of a program in trouble: findings traced to evidence, recommendations costed and sequenced, and a recovery path that answers the hard questions in the room. In health, that scrutiny keeps clinical safety and patient impact in view, not just schedule and budget.
Cyber readiness, continuity and recovery
ASD Essential Eight maturity assessments with a costed remediation path, board and executive tabletop exercises, and the continuity and recovery planning that decides how well you cope on the day the systems are not there.
Run the Essential Eight PulseData, analytics, interoperability and AI governance
The governance that turns data ambition into safe, lawful and usable capability, including the questions a board should be asking before it approves a clinical AI.
Vendor, procurement and contract assurance
An independent read on the shortlist, the contract and the promises, before signature commits you for a decade.
Benefits realisation, workforce readiness and adoption
The unglamorous work that decides whether the investment lands: are the benefits defined, owned and measured, and is the workforce ready to change how it works.
Where this judgement comes from
The advice above is grounded in two decades running technology for health systems on two continents. Those were executive roles, held as an employee of the organisations named. They are distinct from the independent advisory Digital Tactics provides today.
CIO, Maricopa Integrated Health System
Helped bring a billion-dollar US public health system back from the brink of default, implemented an $85M Epic EHR across every facility, and lifted the organisation into the top 8% of US hospitals for EMR adoption.
CIO, St Stephen's Hervey Bay
Led the go-live of Australia's first fully digital hospital, the only Australian facility to reach HIMSS EMRAM Stage 7 and winner of the HIMSS Davies Award.
CDO, Mater (Brisbane)
Led a 250-person team and a $50M budget across 12 hospitals, delivering the group's digital strategy and overhauling its cyber security program.
How engagements are delivered
Every engagement is led by me personally. Depending on scope, the work is delivered independently or as part of an established partner team on larger programs. Where an engagement is delivered under a partner, that is made clear from the outset.
Related work and thinking
Engagement briefs
Health-sector and readiness engagements, published in full where clients permit and sanitised where they do not.
See the engagement briefsPricing an EMR honestly
Why EMR business cases run over, and the cost lines that are missing from most of them.
Read the dispatchCyber readiness for health boards
Prevention, response and rehearsal, in language a board already understands from clinical governance.
Read the dispatchStart with a conversation
A 30-minute discovery call. No deck, no pitch, a frank discussion about the digital health decision in front of you.
Book a discovery call