Dr. Grace Paterson holds post-retirement appointments as Associate Professor, Medical Informatics/Division of Medical Education in the Faculties of Medicine and Graduate Studies, Dalhousie University. She was an essential part of the program development team for Dalhousie’s Master in Health Informatics program (MHI), the first of its kind in Canada. She has taught health information flow and standards courses, supervised MHI thesis students, functioned as preceptor for the medical informatics electives for medical students, created faculty development programs in medical informatics and served as a supervisor in the Health Mentors program. Her research focuses on making decent information available to clinicians, health informaticians, administrators, medical educators and patients (CHAMP model). Her overarching research interest is to build evidence-based informatics knowledge and tackle the semantic interoperability and clinical pragmatic problems associated with SNOMED CT and HL7. Her recent research focused on adoption of electronic medical record (EMR) systems in primary care, pharmacists’ use of a province-wide standards-based drug information system, and the creation of a boundary infostructure for chronic disease management and benefits evaluation for a synoptic operative report for spine surgeries that was implemented as a semantically interoperable solution using HL7 and SNOMED CT together.

She is a founding member of the National Health Informatics Institute (NIHI) and the Standards Collaborative Education and Training Task Force where she contributes her expertise in curricula and competency frameworks in health informatics and medical/health education.