Guest Editorial

Health Care and Informatics Review Online is pleased to announce that it is now the official journal for Health Informatics New Zealand (HINZ). This collaboration denotes an exciting new development for health informatics in New Zealand and highlights the synergy of purpose of the two endeavours.

HINZ actively encourages its members to disseminate their innovative informatics solutions to the health care community through presentations at their quarterly seminars and an annual Conference. These presentations can now be disseminated to the rest of New Zealand and globally through Health Care and Informatics Review Online, showcasing the world leading work being undertaken.

The editorial board therefore, is very pleased to bring you this edition, with a selection of five articles from the 2004 Annual HINZ Conference, held in Wellington in August.

The first article "Measuring Health in the Primary Care Context: Unlocking the Value" from Ken Leech, outlines ProCare’s mission to collect meaningful clinical information in the primary care context. This paper gives us a view of a truly innovative project to develop standards from a local perspective that may become nationally applicable for the benefit of us all.

In the second article, Regan and Cooke of Hutt Valley DHB describe their Regional Health Surveillance system, in "Path-finding in the Public Health Information Quagmire". The system was developed to provide analysis and surveillance on standardised data around public health activities. The systems design reflects the changes to our health care delivery and includes information about the relationships between people, places and public health. The system requires flexibility to cope with this changing health care environment, but is robust enough to maintain accurate and reliable information.

In the third article "Optimising clinical laboratory service delivery with electronic decision support: An analysis of market structure and impacts of regional clinical information strategy", Wong and Chu propose a more managed approach through electronic decision support for the referral of patients for laboratory tests to mitigate the spiralling and uncapped costs of these referrals. This is certainly not just an Auckland issue; many other New Zealand regions and those abroad tasked with managing health care spending will find this article of interest.

The fourth article is from Peter Schloeffel of St Peters South Australia and reviews the ongoing developments of the Electronic Health Record in Australia and internationally. Titled "Current EHR Developments: an Australian and International Perspective", the article describes how the increasing dependency in health care on effective information management is giving many nations the impetus to invest in EHR development. Peter provides us with an extensive overview of the issues around effective implementation of national EHR deployment. The emergence of the openEHR model is overcoming the previous barrier of lack of interoperability, as well as ongoing standards development mean we are increasingly able to implement effective EHR systems throughout entire health care systems.

Underpinning all the systems outlined above is the requirement for improved data quality, as described by Karolyn Kerr of the Ministry of Health in the article titled "The Development of a Data Quality Framework and Strategy for the New Zealand Ministry of Health". Improvements have been found to be necessary with the ability to collect and disseminate increasingly large amounts of complex clinical and administrative data. Data in health care is relied upon to make life-affecting decisions at the individual patient level, right through to national policy level. Kerr outlines a proactive data quality management approach that aims at preventing data quality problems at all points along the data collection to information product continuum.