Mr Paul Naismith
Paul Naismith is a pharmacist and the CEO of Fred IT Group.
Mr Naismith is an IT visionary who has dedicated his career to using technology to improve the ability of pharmacists to care for their patients. Until recently, Paul was also the owner of two community pharmacies in Victoria.
Mr Naismith co-founded Fred in 1991 to develop dispensing software that was faster and easier to use, before developing a pharmacy friendly point-of-sale solution and a pharmacy specific Internet service.
With Mr Naismith at the helm, Fred has since grown into Australia’s largest provider of IT services dedicated to pharmacy with a team of 240 staff.
Based on Mr Naismith’s vision of using technology to improve the business of running pharmacy, the company has continued to invest in and lead industry-wide advances.
These have included the development of key information resources - such as an internet ordering gateway, an online national pharmacy product catalogue, - and working with government on the roll out of real time prescription claiming via PBS Online.
Mr Naismith has been a strong advocate of digital health systems that enable Australian health professionals to provide their patients with better care. From 2005 onwards, he has been a key figure in building support for changes that allow health professionals to share information and improve patient outcomes. This has included leading national and industry-wide collaboration with health professionals, industry groups, technology providers and government.
Mr Naismith’s leadership has culminated in several important achievements. These include the 2009 launch of eRx Script Exchange (Australia’s first national electronic prescriptions exchange for pharmacy and health) and MedView (an online cloud-based platform for managing medicines information). Mr Naismith has recently seen two of his career-long ambitions realised: the 2019 introduction of real-time prescription monitoring to save lives and reduce the accidental misuse of prescription medications; and the 2020 introduction of an Australian system of electronic prescriptions to remove paper-based processes and improve medication safety and convenience for all.
Mr Naismith is Chair of the Board of Pharmaceutical Defence Limited (PDL), pharmacy’s major indemnity insurance provider. He is also Chair of APPCo, publisher of the Australian Journal of Pharmacy. Paul has a Bachelor of Pharmacy from Monash University. He is a member of the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia and is a fellow of the Australian College of Pharmacy.
In 2020, Mr Naismith received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the Faculty of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at Monash University and in 2021 Paul was named the Victorian Pharmacist of the Year by the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia.