Neil is also Professor of Health Informatics in UCD.
A Physicist by background he completed his PhD in Medical Physics from DCU in 1991. He was previously Chief Physicist in St. James’s Hospital, but has had a strong emphasis on health informatics throughout his career including heading up many large implementation projects around clinical information systems, acting as advisor to the Department of Health and project management of a range of medical equipping projects. He led the one of the first EHR projects in Ireland, implementing Cerner into St. James’s in 2006 and initially led the major expansion of this system in 2018. In 2007 he took up the role as Programme Lead on the National Integrated Medical Imaging System (NIMIS) Project for the Health Services Executive, Ireland. This is one of the largest single PACS / RIS system implementations in the world. In recognition of this, the Faculty of Radiology (RCSI) in 2019 awarded Prof. O’Hare an Honorary Fellowship of the Faculty – one of only two non-Radiologists to receive this award in its 60-year history.
Neil has served on many committees at HSE and Department of Health level and in 2020 was appointed to the Irish Government’s Open Data Governance Board. He was previous Chair of the Association of Physical Scientists in Medicine and is current Chair of the Health Informatics Society of Ireland. He was a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and is a current Fellow of the Irish Computer Society.
He was previously the CIO for the Ireland East Hospital Group (2018-2020), and Dir of Informatics at St. James’s Hospital (2012 – 2018). Neil was the first medical physicist in Ireland to achieve Chartered Engineer and Charted Physicist status. He was also the first Irish Healthcare CIO to achieve the international Certified Health CIO award from CHIME.
Previously Neil has previously held academic appointments in Dublin City University and Trinity College Dublin with research interests in health informatics, imaging and UV phototherapy dosimetry; supervised over 50 postgraduate students at MSc and PhD level, and is currently the course Director for the Graduate Diploma & MSc in Healthcare Informatics in UCD.