Health Level 7 New Zealand is a national affiliate of HL7 International, dedicated to the goal of achieving interoperable healthcare information. Its primary – but not exclusive – focus is on current and emerging HL7 standards.
HL7 NZ Constitution – October 2025
The Chairman and Treasurer Annual Reports, presented to the 2026 AGM, can be found in the minutes
At the first meeting of the new Board, held directly afterwards, the following officers were unanimously elected for two-year terms up to the 2028 AGM: John Carter (Chair) and Peter Jordan (Secretary). Peter Sergent (Vice-Chair) and David Moorhouse (Treasurer) will continue in their roles until the 2027 AGM, having been elected to serve two-year terms following the 2025 AGM.
2026-27 OFFICE BEARERS
Chairman – John Carter
Has been involved with HL7 since the late 1990s. He represents New Zealand in the HL7 International Council and has been a member of the Terminology Services Management Group since 2022. He is an independent consultant, currently working on interoperabililty projects with Te Whatu Ora | Health NZ. John is very excited to be one of the facilitators for New Zealand’s new series of FHIR Connectathons, starting with the IPS-athon held at Digital Health Week in November 2023. Previously John was Chief Technology Officer at HealthLink, where he oversaw a product suite encompassing the full range of HL7 standards from version 2.1 to CDA to FHIR. Before moving to Auckland from the USA in 2017, he was Vice President of Apelon, Inc., a professional services and software company focused on semantic interoperability. He holds a BA in Political Science, an MBA (finance), and studied medical informatics at the University of Utah. When he’s not working on health data standards, you’ll often find John swimming along Auckland’s beautiful beaches.
Vice Chairman- Peter Sergent
Has thirty years’ experience in the management of information; initially carrying out complex statistical analysis for research projects but later moving into areas of service provision. Prior to his move to primary health in late 2004, he spent the previous eleven years within a number of District Health Boards. Peter is now an independent consultant. He strongly supports the embracing of international standards such as ISO and HL7 and has been involved in HISO projects covering data dictionaries, information models and data exchange. During time spent within the District Health Boards, completed work on projects in the Middle East and Australia gaining a broader perspective on healthcare provision. He has undertaken numerous and varied roles in working groups advising the Ministry of Health, Accident Compensation Corporation and District Health Boards.
Treasurer – David Moorhouse
Is an experienced system designer and software developer with over 25 years’ experience in NZ and UK. He is currently employed at Pegasus Health as Principal Software Engineer for HealthOne and helped to establish the South Island eReferrals solution.
He is a passionate advocate for health interoperability and has hands-on experience implementing HL7 v2.x and FHIR standards. He understands and has developed solutions using modern authentication and integration standards. David considers open and modern standards as the key to driving innovation by making health informatics easier.
Along with technical skills David brings in-depth experience of the primary care sector and has held governance roles in non-profit organisations.
Secretary – Peter Jordan
Is a highly experienced software architect and developer with a particular interest in healthcare information modelling, terminology and exchange. Until his recent retirement from consulting, he contracted as a Solutions Architect to various national and regional interoperability projects, but still continues to provide the Terminz HL7® FHIR® Terminology, Directory and Conformance Server for community use. Peter also co-developed and maintained the NZ CDA Toolkit used in GP2GP patient record transfers and the NZ e-Prescription Service for 15 years, and his involvement with health information standards dates back to some of New Zealand’s earliest HL7 Version 2 messaging solutions in the 1990s. He also served 2 terms as an Affiliate Director on the HL7 International Board and as an International Council Co-Chair.
2026-27 BOARD MEMBERS
Kyle Martin
Is a seasoned Technical Lead in the Middleware New Zealand Integration team, a group committed to driving open, interoperable ecosystems across sectors such as Open Banking, Open Energy, and Open Health. With deep expertise spanning the full spectrum of integration technologies, Kyle has played a key role in both public and private sector initiatives, particularly those involving FHIR and HL7 standards. Kyle’s work has been instrumental in shaping national API strategies, including the co-development of the New Zealand health sector API standards and the accompanying open-source tooling designed to accelerate their uptake across both government and private providers.
Daniel Thomson
Is a solution architect in the Data & Digital group at Te Whatu Ora. Daniel has a particular interest in all things FHIR, integration, interoperability. Prior to his current role he was the sector integration lead at the Ministry of Health and worked with a wide range of health providers, vendors, and other organisations within the NZ Health sector, to integrate their solutions with the Ministry’s national systems. Daniel holds a PhD in philosophy and undergraduate degrees in computer science and philosophy.
Matthew Valentine
Is an Emergency Medicine specialist working in Whakatane and Tauranga Hospitals. Originally from the US, he has a BA in Religion from Dartmouth College, his Medical Doctorate from Oregon Health and Sciences University, and did his specialist training at Washington University/Barnes Jewish hospital. He came to New Zealand for one year in 2008 but failed to leave. He has a post-graduate diploma in Health Sciences/Health Informatics from the University of Auckland, and serves as the Clinical Director for Informatics at the Bay of Plenty District Health Board. He has been active in various regional and national groups for health IT projects. In addition, he co-founded Cure8Health, a software platform based on HL7 FHIR and SNOMED CT, to utilise these foundational standards for the benefit of health consumers and give people visibility and control of their health information.
Prashanth Koval
Is a Senior Product Manager for Integrations at Medtech Global, where he leads a dynamic team overseeing the ALEX® Integrations Platform.
Prashanth has worked on interoperability and integration solutions at Medtech Global for several years.
He has a rich background in health informatics spanning over 18 years across diverse geographical landscapes, including the UK, India, Australia, and New Zealand.
Prashanth’s commitment to staying at the forefront of industry standards is evident in his work with FHIR® standards and obtaining the FHIR® Proficiency Certification during the implementation of the ALEX® Integrations platform.
Prashanth’s educational journey began at Madras University in India, where he earned his Bachelor’s degree in Microbiology and later pursued a Masters Degree in Biotechnology.
Seeking to deepen his understanding of the intersection of biology and information technology, he furthered his studies at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK, obtaining another Masters degree in Bioinformatics.
Prashanth has also worked as a researcher in the field of Proteomics and Rational Drug Designing.
His notable contributions include authoring two drug target Protein Models for Helicobacter Pylori, both recognized and published in the esteemed Protein Data Bank.
Our Mission
“To provide a comprehensive framework and related standards for the exchange, integration, sharing, and retrieval of electronic health information that supports clinical practice and the management, delivery and evaluation of health services. Specifically, to create flexible, cost effective standards, guidelines, and methodologies to enable healthcare information system interoperability and sharing of electronic health records.
These efforts enable effective, efficient communication between the constituents of the healthcare community as represented by our membership, which consists of an international community of healthcare organizations, vendors, healthcare information systems developers, consultants, systems integrators, and related public and private health services agencies.
The mission of HL7 encompasses the complete ‘life cycle’ of a standards specification – development, adoption, market recognition, utilization and adherence. The HL7 specifications are unified by shared reference models of the healthcare and technical domains.”
Principles of HL7 New Zealand
The user group shall be established on the following basic principles:
- Open membership.
- Democratic election of the Board and technical leaders.
- Not-for-profit.
- Consensus-based qualified-majority balloting process.
- Wide representation of stakeholders.
Functions of HL7 New Zealand
- Acting as a forum for HL7® related standards activity in New Zealand.
- Maintaining the capability to give advice on the use of HL7® standards in New Zealand.
- Providing standards-related education and promoting HL7® certification.
- Hosting periodic HL7® and related standards workshops and seminars in New Zealand.
- Acting as point of contact between Health New Zealand and HL7® International.
- Participating in the work of HL7® International.
- Developing relationships with other HL7® Affiliates.
- To determine and/or publish and maintain the HL7 FHIR Implementation Guides that are considered to be the base FHIR implementation rules for New Zealand.