Gerry Bliss

Gerry is one of the first 12 UVic Health Information Science graduates in the class of 1987. (He even has his notes from the first HINF class ever taught.) His 35-year trajectory as a health informatician has taken him through incarnations that include the development of the first successful province-wide health data warehouse in Canada, establishing the first comprehensive information security framework at one of the largest health regions in Canada, co-authoring national guidelines for the protection of health information, and leading the privacy and security track of the largest national health information system project in Canada.

His focus for the past two decades had been on helping organizations and individuals in Canada and the U.S. understand the ethical, legal, and technical implications of privacy rights and responsibilities, and more importantly, helping them be successful meeting their attendant responsibilities. He’s contributed to the development of privacy legislation, held executive roles with privacy and security professional organizations and authored countless privacy and security assessments and audits.

His interests all focus around the two key informatic tasks of making health information useful while protecting it on behalf of the individuals it belongs to. They include data governance, analytics, identity management, and access controls.

For the past decade he has had the honour and pleasure of sharing knowledge and experience with HINF students and faculty colleagues while teaching HINF330 - Legal and Security Issues in Health Informatics.

When he’s not teaching, he’s helping clients who are moving to the cloud, investing in telemedicine, negotiating privacy with service providers, or dodging the fallout of a privacy breach. Otherwise, he’s digging in the garden, riding his motorcycle, or playing in, on, or under a boat.

Other contributions to his alma mater include serving on the UVic Alumni board of directors and helping to organize HINF Alumni events.