Covid-19 presents opportunity for standards

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Picture: Ministry of Health deputy director data and digital Shayne Hunter

eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

Covid-19 presents an “amazing opportunity” to develop standards to ensure the sustainability of digital changes in the health sector, says Ministry of Health deputy director general data and digital Shayne Hunter.

Speaking at an HL7NZ webinar on 28 April, he said conversations within the Ministry and with chief information officers in both DHBs and primary care confirmed the need to, “cement in every change and ensure it is positive and sustainable”.

He asked webinar attendees to consider what standards need to be rapidly developed in order to ensure the digital changes are sustained.

The Health Information Standards Organisation already developed a new standard for the data set that Community Based Assessment Centres need to collect and be able to report during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Hunter said this was pushed through under urgency. The rapid release meant the data field that captured people’s license plates later had to be removed as it was discouraging certain people from going to testing centres due to concern that the plate number might be used for other purposes.

“It was unusual circumstances and we wouldn't necessarily move that fast, but it was a good example of responding quickly,” said Hunter.

“There’s a great opportunity to leverage Covid-19 going forward and what we need to think about is what areas of standards opportunity has Covid-19 presented that we need to move on and what ones do we need to move on reasonably quickly?”

Hunter told attendees that the Ministry wants to strengthen the work of HISO in terms of resourcing and how it goes about developing standards in a modern world.

It also wants to support the growth of the HL7 developer community around Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources in New Zealand as the Ministry is “absolutely behind FHIR”.

He said the Health and Disability System Review interim report was very clear about the role of standards in health and the importance of investing in standards and ensuring good adoption.

“We're having conversations at the moment around, what are the levers and mechanisms for us to ensure that we actually get the level of adoption that we need,” said Hunter.

“We are increasingly of the view that that our role is to establish good foundations in terms of national systems, but also to work on evolving and introducing standards in a way that supports the rapid world in which we need to deliver new systems.”

If you would like to provide feedback on this news story, please contact the editor Rebecca McBeth.

Read more news:

HISO develops Covid-19 data standard

Contact tracing app weeks away

For more information and resources about COVID-19 go to https://www.hinz.org.nz/page/covid19

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