National Primary Care Data Service delayed

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Picture: Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners medical director Richard Medlicott

eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

The creation of a National Primary Care Data Service has been delayed due to funding issues.

Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners medical director Richard Medlicott presented at the Emerging Tech in Health conference in Christchurch this month and told attendees that the project had been stymied by funding issues at the Ministry of Health.

The new service is intended to provide a joined-up view of primary care data to support the sector’s understanding of population health, quality improvement initiatives and health system planning.

“We need a national way of getting disparate reports from different PHOs [primary health organisations] back to PHOs, DHBs, MoH, doctors and the public as well,” said Medlicott.

He had been hoping to be getting the first reports out of a new system this year, but is now aiming for 2020.

The project has stalled because the total cost is expected to be about $10 million over five years, which means it has to go through a business case process.

However, the pause may allow the project to take advantage of new technologies.

“The silver lining is that technology has changed and perhaps that six to 18-month pause might change the model – whether it’s a data lake or warehouse,” Medlicott said.

At the end of 2017, the primary care networks jointly funded an Expression of Interest for a National Primary Care Data Service.

The 23 respondents were whittled down to two providers, Pinnacle PHO’s innovation arm Ventures and Wellington’s DataCraft Analytics.

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