Standards & governance
Standards leadership held in Ron's own name.
Personal roles at HL7 International, HL7 Canada, and ISO/TC 215, where the standards decisions that shape the field actually get made. This page names them openly. (Client engagements remain anonymised; see engagements.)
Current & past roles
Where Ron has sat when the decisions were made.
2020 – present
International Board Director · Council Co-Chair
HL7 International
Board director at the world's leading health-informatics standards body, and co-chair of the International Mentoring Committee and the International Council.
2018 – present
Affiliate Chair
HL7 Canada
Chair of the Canadian affiliate of HL7 International, coordinating national participation in standards development and ballot activity.
long-standing
Canadian Delegate
ISO / TC 215 · Health Informatics
Long-standing member of the Canadian delegation to the International Organisation for Standardisation's Technical Committee on Health Informatics.
2003 – 2018
Former Group Director of Architecture
Canada Health Infoway
Fifteen years stewarding the national reference architecture and standards portfolio of the federal digital-health corporation.
2014 – 2020
Project Lead & Contributing Editor
ITU · WHO
Digital Health Platform Handbook: a global reference for national platform architecture used by ministries in 30+ countries.
1998 – 2002
Co-Chair, Partnership Data Modeling Group
Canadian Institute for Health Information
Early cross-provincial data-modelling work that laid the groundwork for later national reference architecture.
Areas of contribution
Where the personal effort has gone.
Three interconnected tracks: the standards themselves, the governance around them, and the international contribution that keeps the field coherent.
Standards development
- HL7 v2 message profiles and jurisdictional implementation guides
- HL7 CDA document templates and cross-domain harmonisation
- HL7 FHIR resource design and national implementation guides
- ISO/TC 215 working-group contributions on health informatics standards
- National terminology standards (SNOMED CT, LOINC) profile and governance work
Governance craft
- Design of multi-stakeholder standards councils (national and regional)
- Working-group charters, ballot procedures, and appeal mechanisms
- Change-management and versioning policy for standards portfolios
- Successor development: recruiting and mentoring future chairs and editors
- Conflict resolution and consensus formation on contested standards
International contribution
- Mentoring international HL7 affiliates through the International Mentoring Committee
- Bridging HL7 and ISO governance where the two overlap
- Contributing to WHO and ITU digital-health reference architecture work
- Advising ministries on standards-body engagement strategy
- Speaking and teaching at international conferences and working meetings
Governance principles
Six principles for standards governance that lasts.
Distilled from four decades inside standards bodies: the design habits that make a council or a working group actually durable over release cycles and successor chairs.
01
Charter for disputes, not for good times
The clauses that matter are the ones that resolve disputes. Everything else can be handled by norms.
02
Decision rights before scope
Who decides what, before what needs deciding. Scope will always grow; decision rights should not have to.
03
Editorial voice is load-bearing
A standard without a strong editor becomes a set of clauses no one can implement. Fund the editor.
04
Implementers in the room
Every working group should include people whose day job is to implement against the standard. Not later. From the start.
05
Successors as design constraint
A council designed around one person is a council that dies with them. Rotate everything on purpose.
06
Publish more than you ballot
Rationale, examples, implementation notes. The ballot text is a small part of what an implementer actually needs.
Standards work?
Ron takes on a small number of standards-governance engagements.
Design of standards councils, working-group charters, and successor development for national standards bodies. If that's your problem, a call is the fastest way to know.