Over more than a decade in her current role, Carolyn has been a visionary enabler of relationships and whole-of-system thinking in the Canterbury health system. She has been a leading advocate of
alliancing in healthcare and of enabling the delivery of care at home and in the community care to minimise hospital admissions. Carolyn is working on a number of initiatives to address the social
determinants of health outside of the health system through collaborations with other sectors including social welfare and education. The collaborative, patient-centred model she has championed in Canterbury has been extensively reviewed by the King's Fund and is cited as a model for integrated care systems being implemented in the UK.
Carolyn has also been a sponsor of many key technology projects to support collaborative ways of working, including clinical pathways (HealthPathways), e-referral (ERMS), shared health record
(HealthOne), and care planning tools. The success of these projects has depended on creating a high-trust environment and strong relationships across the health system. Carolyn has also been a
champion of data-driven decision making and integrating real-time reporting into both system planning and clinical decision making
Carolyn is a driving force behind Canterbury DHB’s reputation as a world leader in using Health Care analytics to operate, plan and improve an integrated health system. Under her leadership,
Canterbury undertook a world first with SNOMED with the implementation of HCAS, which applies natural language processing to the unstructured text based data in the clinical record. With over 1.5 Billion SNOMED concepts tagged in our health record, Canterbury DHB is now using the written record in analytics and decision making to improve our health system.