Speaking at the Epidemic Response Committee on 7 April, Director General of Health Ashley Bloomfield said the platform is connected to existing health databases using the National Health Index, including a database of all of the lab testing being done.
The NHI number is a unique identifier assigned to every person who uses health and disability support services.
“The tremendous advantage for New Zealand is having the National Health Index,” he said.
“By moving our contact tracing on to that electronic data base and being able to connect through the NHI and our data base of cases kept by ESR on EpiSurv, we can link by NHI to laboratory data, clinical data and clinical outcomes and build up a really good picture.
“This is the week that we will be able to pull all that information and data together from databases using that NHI linkage and it will be very helpful in being able to describe the picture in New Zealand from an epidemiological perspective, by identifying populations at higher risk and geographical areas where we need to do more testing.”
Currently, about 0.2 percent of New Zealand’s population has tested positive for Covid-19.
“But what we want to have is that nuance to see what the positivity rate is in different regions of the country to make sure we are getting a good spread of testing,” Bloomfield told the committee.
eHealthNews.nz understands the digital platform has been built on Salesforce technology.
At the committee meeting, Act party leader David Seymour questioned Bloomfield and Health Minister David Clark about the potential use of Singapore’s smartphone app TraceTogether, which records who people have encountered and can aid in contact tracing.
The app is voluntarily downloaded and requires Bluetooth and location services to be turned. When another phone running the app comes into range it exchanges a timestamp, Bluetooth signal strength, the phone’s model, and a temporary identifier or device nickname.
Clark confirmed that Singapore had offered to share the source code of its Trace Together app for free, but there was a wait of two weeks. He said the Ministry is talking to people with close contacts in Singapore about the opportunity.
“If we can adapt that technology to New Zealand and New Zealanders are willing to step-up, as they have been through this period, that would make a significant difference in our ability to ramp up the different methods of contact tracing to ensure that we are covering all the bases,” he said.
Bloomfield added that an app of this kind is not a replacement for contact tracing.
“It provides a broader picture of people with whom a case may have been in close contact, because it uses Bluetooth exchange between phones,” he said.
“It will still requires the mainstay of contact tracing, which is identifying who the people are; getting their contact detail; and a phone call from a trained person that can talk to them about what self-isolation means what symptoms to look for; and then of course do the daily follow up.”
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