A rare spot of good news on health IT infrastructure

Our health sector is in turmoil with Te Whatu Ora’s board having been sacked, cost overruns, and fragmented IT systems doing little to help the merged district health boards work as a cohesive system.

But some good news arrived this week with the go-live for the National Data Platform, a common platform for national datasets that were previously scattered across the dozens of entities that have now been brought into the Health New Zealand - Te Whatu Ora fold.

The system creates one consistent national information hub for health-related data that is crucial to planning the allocation of public health resources, as well as running analytics and reporting tools across the health sector to see how it is tracking towards achieving national health targets. 

Four data sets are available with on the NPB with three more to be added. 

Accenture and Acumen BI were appointed last year to design and implement the platform, which is built on Snowflake and hosted on AWS. At the time, then interim head of integration, Stuart Bloomfield, said the NDP would offer “modern, secure, automated technologies” to allow health data sets to be accessed for reporting and analytics.

“It is the beginning of a multi-year transition and we’re looking forward to connecting our many data environments into one nationally consistent information hub. The data will be secured and ready for analysis so we can track how the health system is performing and where we can improve,” Bloomfield said.

Previously, health providers held data in different ways, that varied in their “degree of maturity, quality, and consistency”, said Bloomfield. Data on modifiable health behaviours and chronic conditions will help researchers gauge longterm trends to improve health interventions.

National health targets are a priority of the coalition Government and the data will feed into both setting future targets and monitoring progress.

The Government’s five health targets came into effect on 1 July,” health minister Dr Shane Reti told the General Practice Conference earlier this week. 

“These targets are tightly focused on faster cancer treatment, improved immunisation rates, shorter stays in ED, and shorter wait times for specialist assessments and elective treatment. 

“Some of these targets were hard for the previous Government, and they will be hard for me too. I’m committed to targets, but targets alone won’t drive change – they need to be backed up with careful planning, new thinking and new models of care around the targets,” Reti added.

The current datasets on NDP do not include primary care data from GP clinics and community care operations. 

Primary care data coming

“The primary care data programme is part of the NDP programme and is to be included on the NDP over the current financial year - great progress is being made in prioritising this data and also what data already on the NDP can be shared back to Primary Care,” Accenture’s Dr Will Reedy wrote in a LinkedIn post this week.

Also adding her thoughts on Linkedin, Kari Jones, chief data & AI officer, Te Whatu Ora, said that retail and airlines had set the bar high when it came to “Effortless customer experience”.

“And so our our goal is unlock the power of data to reimagine the health sector, to create more frictionless and seamless experience for consumers,” she wrote.

The initial phase of the NDP was completed by June 30, 2024, and a group of Health NZ data analysts is now testing the platform.

“The Medicines Data Repository (MDR) and Cardiovascular Disease Risk Assessment (CVDRA) datasets are already operational and providing insights to testers,” eHealth News reported. 

“The latest NDP update says Trendcare, interRAI and Provation (endosocopy) data has also been onboarded,” it added.

Still on the Ministry of Health roadmap for this year according to its website is Hira, “a technology solution that will enable people, whanau and providers to have a consistent way to access health information”. This will be more tangible to the average New Zealander than the NDP, as it could smooth out some of the problems that emerge from patient health and wellbeing information being stored in different places in different formats. Soon there will be a consistent way to access info like what medicines a patient is on, and their lab results.

“It will enable information to be pulled from different systems to create a personal health record,” the Ministry claims.

But the project has run into trouble. As BusinessDesk reported in February:

“Critics, most of whom spoke anonymously for fear of losing business opportunities with the government, described the project as a ‘trainwreck’ and ‘an incredible waste of money’, which had alienated NZ IT vendors with poor communication and a lack of transparency.”

Photo credit: Hush Naidoo Jade Photography/Unsplash