Wellington clinical IT leader will be “deeply missed”

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Picture: Peter Hicks

eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

Well-known and respected ICU doctor Peter Hicks has been remembered for his huge contribution to health IT in New Zealand.

Hicks was a doctor at Capital and Coast District Health Board where he held pivotal roles in the organisation – including management and leadership of ICU, and a clinical advisory role with ICT. He also sat on the National Information Clinical Leadership Group.

He died following a medical event at Tasman Glacier this month. He was aged 57.

CCDHB interim chief executive Julie Patterson said Hicks’s role with ICU and his personality meant he touched almost every department across the organisation, and gave care and support to many patients and families over the years.

“He was well-respected and highly regarded across the country, and will be deeply missed,” she said.

3DHB chief information officer Shayne Hunter said Hicks was critical to the success of a number of important ICT advancements that contributed to patient outcomes – including electronic referrals, the Primary Care Shared Care Record, Patient Wi-Fi, Lab Test Results Sign off and the establishment of a Regional Clinical Portal.

“He led the charge to get CCDHB off very old pager technology, and we are the first DHB in New Zealand to have done this,” said Hunter.

“[Hicks] was also an important clinical voice on a number of key IT governance groups, including CCDHB’s Information Privacy and Security Governance Group and the Sub-Regional Information Management Alliance.

“His guidance to the ICT team was invaluable, and provided a much-needed patient and clinician perspective.”

Hicks developed an ICU database to support the admit and discharge of all the DHB’s ICU patients. The database currently contains 26,300 patient admissions, dating back to March 2001, and is “unparalleled globally”, said Hunter. 

He said this data is often accessed during new admissions or pre-admission to help decision making, and to support weekly mortality and morbidity meetings, and reporting to ANZICS CORE (an Australasian ICU database).

There were several sub-databases, including the bereavement database for patients who die, so their families are followed up by the ICU team, and the Patient At Risk (PAR) database that contains record of all PAR nurse activity.

Hicks also developed a flight database, where planned and completed inter-hospital transfers are recorded by the DHB’s flight team.

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