General Discussion / Social Media, page-3375

Yesterday, NZ’s Health Minister announcedradical changes to NZ’s health system, expected to take effect next year.

Essentially, the present District Health Boardsare to be scrapped and replaced by one national body NZ Health. The need for harmonizing IT systems featured prominently in the announcement.

Hereare some extracts from an opinion piece “Fixing our broken health IT systems” writtenby respected NZ IT journalist Peter Griffin (not the full article):

The scrapping ofthe DHBs in favour of one national health authority overturns the devolvedmodel that has predominated for over 25 years, but which has left us with afragmented mess of information technology (IT) systems across our hospitals andclinics.

As a nation wehave underinvested in technology in the health sector, spending an estimated 2.5% of the annual health budget on IT compared to the global average of around 4.8%.

Even worse, mostof that spend, about $350 million to $400m in the current financial year, goeson maintaining legacy IT systems.

The DHBs are aseries of fiefdoms when it comes to IT procurement. They might collaborateoccasionally and share ideas, but they are effectively in competition with eachother for precious resources.

In somehospitals, doctors tap on iPads, in others, they still write up notes on paperclipboards. Some GP clinics can easily share patient information digitally withmedical specialists, others fax or mail documents.

Work must ramp upon the development of the national Health Information Platform (nHIP), which is aimed at improving data interoperability between healthcare providers. After slow progress in this area, the Ministry of Health has made it a priority and covid has only highlighted the need for it.

Sharing data inthe public health sector is one thing, but nHIP needs to work across theprivate sector as well, and incorporate data standards and architectureallowing information to be integrated into innovative new services that are yetto emerge.

The new healthagency has the power to push through changes that must be universally adopted.Here’s an opportunity to finally create a data-driven health sector where yourpatient data follows you wherever you go for health care. Every provider shouldbe required to become nHIP-certified, so they can be relied on as a trustedguardian of that data.

We have a digitalliteracy problem in our health system. It isn’t the fault of our medicalprofessionals. They are overloaded and doing their best with often incompletetraining and access to good technology.

As a result, theyare resistant to change and I’ve heard stories of doctors still wanting to sendfaxes because they aren’t confident using patient records systems.

The use ofdigital devices, apps and online tools has the potential to save our healthworkers time, reduce errors and improve the experience for workers and patientsalike.