Keynote Speaker

Hamish Fraser is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School with appointments in the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities at the Brigham and Women's hospital and the Informatics Program at Boston Children's hospital. Since 2000 he has been the Director of Informatics and Telemedicine at Partners In Health, a healthcare NGO based in Boston. He is also Assistant Professor of the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology Program. His training is as a physician in general medicine and cardiology, predominantly from Edinburgh Royal Infirmary and related hospitals in Scotland. He holds a master's degree in Artificial Intelligence/Knowledge Based Systems from Edinburgh University. He completed a fellowship in medical informatics split between the MIT Clinical Decision Making Group and the Divisions of Clinical Decision Making and Cardiology at the Tufts-New England Medical Center in Boston. The main project was designing and performing an evaluation of a computer program to assist with the diagnosis of heart disease.

Dr Fraser currently leads several projects to improve access to medical information in Peru, Haiti, the Philippines, Rwanda and South Africa. In 2000 he was appointed to head the informatics and telemedicine component of the Partners in Health project to treat multi-resistant TB in Peru. This large project, funded by the Gates Foundation and now the Global Fund, is providing medical care, investigation and medication for patients in Peru and parts of Russia. He and his team have built a Web based electronic medical record that is being used for clinical management, teleradiology, data analysis and drug supply management in Peru and the Philippines. This system was further developed to support treatment of HIV in rural Haiti and is now being deployed to support clinics in Rwanda. He is currently working with colleagues in Kenya, South Africa the US, and the WHO to create an open source, standard design for a medical record system to support treatment of HIV and other diseases in developing countries. Dr Fraser is also the educational director for a new masters degree program in medical and public health informatics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. His other interests include security and confidentiality of medical data, improving quality of care and reducing medical errors, evaluation of clinical information systems and patient access to medical information.