Dr Rosemary Foster is a senior technical advisor with the Centre for Infectious Diseases Epidemiology and Research (CIDER) in the University of Cape Town’s School of Public Health and Family Medicine, where her work is focused on digital interventions and informatics to support healthcare service delivery.
Rosemary has an academic background in social science, computer science and biomedical engineering on which she has built extensive experience in information technology and medical informatics, in Canada and South Africa.
As Director of ICT Services for the Department of Health with the Provincial Government of the Western Cape of South Africa, she led several significant digital health initiatives, including the implementation of a unique health identifier that is now being replicated nationally. In Canada she managed Community and Primary Health Care Programs at eHealth Saskatchewan.
She initiated the eHealth Strategy and Policy Division at the South African Medical Research Council where she led the work on the development of the first national eHealth Strategy for South Africa. and was a key contributor to the country’s Health Normative Standards Framework (HNSF) for eHealth.
Rosemary is on the World Health Organization Roster of Digital Health Experts; her areas of interest include eHealth policy and strategy, health enterprise architecture, eHealth standards, human factors in health information systems and capacity building in health informatics.