Candid Conversations on What is Needed to Achieve a Digitally Optimized Clinic

Presenter Bios:

Dominik Nowak, MD

Dr. Dominik Nowak is the Ontario Medical Association’s president and a family doctor at Women’s College Hospital.

Dr. Nowak trained at McMaster University, where he specialized in family medicine and served as chief resident. He went on to the University of Toronto to finish a master of health administration at the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation as well as the ICD-Rotman Directors Education Program at the Rotman School of Management.

Dr. Nowak is a faculty member in the Department of Family and Community Medicine and the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto. He is a recipient of the College of Family Physicians of Canada Award of Excellence for his leadership in Canadian health care.

Beth Gerritsen

Beth is an experienced clinician, health informatics expert and start-up executive from Ontario, Canada. She is passionate about promoting patient empowerment, optimizing efficiency, and improving healthcare quality using technology.

Beth has held a position as family nurse practitioner for over 10 years, and worked as an acute care pediatric nurse prior to this. As a course facilitator at the Rotman School of Management in the Global Health Sector Strategy stream, she brings her clinical expertise to health innovation and system leadership courses. In 2019, she co-founded a Women’s Health Conference with McMaster University, bringing together attendees from all over North America.

From 2019 to 2021, Beth held a variety of strategic advisory roles with the Ontario Government’s digital and innovation committees.

As Senior Vice President at FirstHx, Beth is working to transform our health systems by empowering patients to provide their medical history using a knowledge driven, adaptive software solution. By improving standardization, creating efficiencies in documentation, and aligning evidence-based medical histories through digitization, she believes all patients can experience better access to high-quality care.

Payal Agarwal, MD

As a family physician and Integrated Chief Medical Informatics and Innovation Officer for Kitchener-Waterloo’s Grand River and St. Mary’s Hospitals, Dr. Agarwal is passionate about using digital health solutions to engage physicians and patients. A longtime supporter of women taking a larger role in health technology, she is committed to building bridges between groups (leveraging her engineering degree at the same time!) and reciprocating the mentorship she received from other women in medicine. She led the strategy to optimize digital health tools at Grand River and St. Mary’s Hospitals and has played a crucial role in developing and implementing Evidence2Practice Ontario to facilitate digitally enabled health care. She has also incorporated secure messaging and other integrated programs into her own practice for a more collaborative, human-centred approach to patient care and believes the “EMR is a great place to collaborate, especially for patients with complex medical histories, so that everyone involved in their care can work together continuously and seamlessly.” Dr. Agarwal was named by Digital Health Canada as one of the 2023 Women Leaders in Digital Health attesting to her outstanding leadership and is a 2023 OntarioMD Luminary Award winner recognized for her outstanding contributions to advance digital health.

Keith Chung

Keith Chung is a lawyer and software developer who co-founded and manages Magenta Health, a technology enabled primary care clinic, and also CHIME Technology, a health IT company that focuses on clinic orchestration, patient flow, and workflow technology. He was also a founding member of the East Toronto Family Practice Network and the Ontario Health Team for East Toronto; has led multiple Ontario Health funded digital health projects and innovations; and has contributed to the development of provincial standards related to online scheduling and virtual care