Joanna Harrison

Joanna Harrison has 20 years of leadership experience in health system strategic planning, advancing clinical informatics and transforming service delivery.
In 2024, Joanna became Executive Director of Clinical Informatics, Digital Health, at Interior Health (IH), covering over 215,000 square kilometres of geographically diverse terrain, 54 First Nation communities, 15 Métis Chartered communities, 7,048 long-term care (LTC) and assisted living beds and 18 health centres. IH’s Digital Health strategy is to advance person-centred technology and a data-driven system of care. In this role, she builds on her innovative leadership to improve the health and well-being for people, their families and communities by advancing access to evidence-based technology to improve quality of care, life and work life, equitable access to high quality Wi-Fi, and a standardized electronic medical records system.

Previous to this role, as the pandemic was declared in 2020, Joanna became Executive Director of Seniors Strategic Care Transformation. Over the next three years, she made significant contributions to the health and well-being of people living and working in the IH region while responding to the immense impacts of the pandemic, wildfires and floods as an instrumental member of the Emergency Management Operations Centre. IH’s long-term care homes had experienced strain, loss and sadness due to the pandemic and very early on Joanna recognized that support for LTC homes had to be amplified at an exponential level. It is not an exaggeration when Joanna exclaimed to her colleagues, “we need a LTC Emergency Response Team on steroids!”

During this monumental time, Joanna led the creation and development of IH’s Seniors Strategy 2022-27, a strategy to lead IH’s transformation of seniors care services across LTC, Home Health/Support and Palliative/End of Life services. She identified quality, results, people, access, research and innovation as integral areas of focus to truly transform seniors care services. She prioritizes a health care system that wraps around each person.

“Joanna is a transformational leader for health care, who excels in building diverse high-quality teams and achieving outstanding results. Her commitment to person-centred care ensures that every decision and action are guided by the needs and dignity of each individual,” said Karen Littleton, Director, Population Health, Clinical Prevention & Pandemic Response, Interior Health. “It has been a pleasure to have Joanna as a leader and, no matter which team she leads, our organization and the people she serves are in good hands.”

Joanna is a certified health executive and member of the Canadian College of Health Leaders who also holds a Bachelor of Science honours degree in physiotherapy from Kings College London University, and a Master of Science degree (International Management with specialization in Health Systems) from the University of Liverpool. She also completed a Health System Improvement Fellowship from the School of Public Health at the University of Alberta.
Joanna is passionate about high-quality care, service and life for everyone and is instrumental in leading work to make improvements across BC. She strongly advocates for mental health supports across the system and believes in decreasing social isolation with a goal that no person receiving care is alone. She focuses on how to leverage technology and innovation – an example is the implementation of the IH Rendever VR Program in response to social isolation and quality of life for people living/working in LTC. With a learning health systems lens to improve care, she leads, co-leads and collaborates with researchers to implement new technology solutions to improve the quality of care within the seniors’ system.

Joanna is an amazing human with a huge heart and kind soul who has made and continues to make significant change and improvements across the health system.