A Day in the Life of a CIO: Bill Le Blanc, former CIO, University of South Australia

It was early 2017 and experienced CIO, Bill Le Blanc, found himself providing testimony to a coroner’s inquiry into the death several months earlier of a patient at Adelaide’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital.

At the time, Le Blanc was CIO at SA Health and leading the roll out of the controversial $400 million enterprise patient administration system (EPAS) across the state. The EPAS was built to place electronic information about patients’ medical histories into the hands of treating doctors as quickly as possible.

But it came under fire from the coroner for its inability to produce comprehensive paper copies of patient records. Two years later, the SA government said it was overhauling the system to introduce major changes following a six-month review.

This was a stressful time for Le Blanc who last month announced he was retiring from full-time work after a 40-year career in IT, most recently as CIO…