Digital Transformation is Coming in Health

The healthcare system is front and centre in everyone’s lives right now. The public health response to the Covid-19 pandemic has been the most obvious aspect of this, but behind the scenes, there is a massive change taking place.

In September, Health Minister Andrew Little announced the interim board members for the new Health New Zealand and the Māori Health Authority. That signalled the start of a transition period leading up to 1 July 2022 when the new agencies are expected to be up and running, and the current District Health Boards will be no more.

Most New Zealanders are accustomed to seeing computer screens in clinics, doctors’ surgeries and hospitals and therefore may have assumed that the health system is just as digitalised as any other part of society, but that is far from the truth.

Health is a complex and controversial sector worldwide, and the supporting digital systems reflect that. New Zealand has a long and rich history in this area. In the 1980s and 1990s, New Zealand was regarded as one of the most advanced countries in the OECD in terms of digital technology driving better healthcare. Since then, others have caught up and we seem to be lagging behind in a few areas.

The Health & Disability System Review published in 2019 devoted an entire chapter to digital and data issues. The report noted that although there is a high degree of computerisation in the sector, there is a lack of digital communication and coordination across different parts of the system. In digital transformation terms, we might call this the “patient journey”. The report foreshadows the development of a National Health Information Platform as a means by which the thousands of different systems in place can talk to one another or “interoperate”.

The pandemic accelerated the introduction of innovations such as virtual consultations and paperless transactions for prescriptions and lab tests. This is all good stuff, but it is still the case that almost all our health records are stored in separate systems of multiple health practitioners.

That is about to change.

The Ministry of Health has published a strategic framework for digital health which for the first time advocates a person-centred approach to the management of health records.

It appears that in the future we will have more control of our own health information, while at the same time, digital services will be brought in to improve the performance of the health system and make possible new ways of delivering health services.

We are seeing the first steps towards this with the My Covid Record that is now available in beta. I signed up for this recently. It links to the long-established National Health Index and the Real Me government identity system to give me access to my recent Covid vaccinations. The same data is automatically transmitted to my GP’s system.

While there are some who are scoffing, these small steps represent the first ripples in what looks like a wave of major change. The government has included a good deal of funding to enable this, and if the confidence of the officials who successfully demonstrated the beta system to the whole country on national television is any indication, there is a pretty good chance that we have a group of people ready and able to start implementation.

The National Health Information Platform has now been christened Hira, a te reo Māori word meaning “to have a significant bearing on future events”.

Sounds exciting to me!

Ray Delany is the Founder of CIO Studio, a company built to partner with SMEs and help them solve the “strategy” problem and align their digital investment with their business outcomes.

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