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Welcome to this October 2007 edition of Health Care and Informatics Review Online, which presents a selection of full papers from “Health Informatics: Effecting Change for Better Health Outcomes”, the Health Informatics New Zealand (HINZ) Forum and Exhibition 2007, held 29-31 October 2007 in Rotorua, New Zealand.
Health Care and Informatics Review Online is in its fourth year as the official journal for HINZ and a key part of that role is coverage of this important annual event.
The theme for this year’s event was developed in response to the evidence that benefits from health IT have typically been sparse. Critically the Forum set out to answer such questions as: "What are the pathways to success?" and "What elements of leadership, planning, technology and culture must come together to implement systems that make a measurable difference to healthcare quality and efficiency?".
As such, the HINZ Forum & Exhibition 2007 provided a venue for health professionals, industry, government and academia to come together to share recent successes and failures, and to communicate ideas and questions regarding successful informatics-driven change in healthcare systems.
It is our pleasure to have the opportunity to make this information even more readily available through publication of a selection of full papers for the HINZ Forum in Health Care and Informatics Review Online.
Seven of eight submissions accepted as full papers are presented in this edition. Full papers were accepted on the basis of paper scoring and review, conducted by the HINZ scientific programme committee.
Papers covered a broad range of subjects and reflect the widespread innovation in technology application that is typical in the health sector in
The use of information technology in the primary care setting was a dominant theme with a range of applications of technology considered including web-based clinical decision support (Susan Wells and colleagues) and the use of routinely collected patient management system data as the basis for quality audit statistics (Jim Warren and colleagues). An interesting future view on the use of electronic health records in general practice is presented by Doug Neilson while Judith Engelbrecht and colleagues report on barriers to better use of technologies and the decision support capabilities they provide in primary care.
Dave Parry and colleagues report on an example of a home telecare system, based on the use of radio frequency identification systems, to support people living with illness or disability.
A valuable perspective is presented by Malcolm Miller, who presents an approach to conceiving and implementing evidence-based health care connectivity solutions. The focus is on connecting individuals rather than infrastructure – putting patients and clinicians at the centre of new models of connectivity for improved communication and collaboration.
Finally, David Menkes and Alec Holt report on a programme under development that will enable clinicians to more effectively monitor and manage metabolic syndrome among antipsychotic-treated patients. While important as a contribution toward multidisciplinary management of an urgent and extensive unmet clinical need in New Zealand, the project may also have value as a more general model system to develop distributed information access to clinicians of various disciplines, as well as to patients, researchers and administrators.
