Industry View: NZ urgently needs digital health tech investment

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Regular column by Scott Arrol, NZHIT CEO

New Zealand needs to fund keyboard-ready projects such as the proposed national health information platform to help drive the economic recovery post-Coronavirus, argues NZHIT chair Scott Arrol.

The pandemic has highlighted the vital importance of the whole Kiwi health sector and also highlighted that New Zealand urgently needs more investment in digital health technology to help drive the economic recovery post-coronavirus, create full tech enablement to support healthcare delivery and play its part in protecting New Zealanders during the current pandemic and the inevitable virus outbreaks to come in the future.

It’s understandable for the government to prioritise shovel-ready projects such as construction and roading but this mustn’t be at the expense of keyboard-ready projects such as the proposed national health information platform.  Now more than ever is the time to drive hard on creating a standards-driven, fully interoperable health IT infrastructure that enables data to securely flow to where its most needed to enable the health workforce to provide the best care possible.

This isn’t about replacing people for robots, it’s about providing already fully stretched clinical and non-clinical staff with the tech tools they desperately need when looking after their patients.  During the pandemic we’ve been very fortunate to have a number of solid and reliable IT systems in place that have been upscaled and, in some cases, repurposed in order to meet recent demands.  However, now is the time to address the long-term under investment in digital technologies to provide the infrastructure and tech tools needed to deliver world class healthcare to all New Zealanders.

In comparison to global investment trends, New Zealand’s public health system is spending approximately half of what it should per annum and this has been going on for the last 15-20 years. This equates to a shortfall of at least $300 million a year, let alone the additional spend to bring health’s IT infrastructure up to a point where we can achieve full digital transformation.

Without this it will be very difficult to support the levels of innovation required to future-proof our national requirements whilst driving the very important export growth that will deliver dollars and expertise back into the country.  For too long we’ve treated IT as a cost and not an investment in our health and wellbeing.  Across the board there is genuine commitment and leadership for digital tech to reach a state of full enablement to support the delivery of health and disability services. Financial certainty is the crucial ingredient now required to boost the next phase of development that is sorely needed.

The changes that have been forced onto parts of the health sector due to the pandemic have been immense, but they have also pulled down pre-existing barriers so that digital tech can minimise the full impact of these disruptions.  Primary care, for example, had to very quickly close the doors on walk-in patients with GPs, pharmacists, physios, podiatrists and many more turning to telehealth and virtual technologies to keep providing services remotely.  This has created an almost once in a lifetime opportunity to use tech to help lock in a number of these changes and considerably propel our healthcare system forward.

We will see a mix of fully virtual and hybrid general practice services that will increasingly become consumer-driven, provided from anywhere in the country, or possibly the world, caused by historical physical barriers being dropped and replaced by digital technologies, but this takes investment and the vision to push forward at a time when some will want to slip back to pre-Covid ways of working.

We’ve already got world leading digital health providers, tech-savvy clinicians and managers all of whom are doing their best to meet the ever-increasing health demands being placed on them.  However, this is not enough to stem the tide and there’s no hiding the fact that New Zealand’s already stretched health system now needs a digital tech injection that is long overdue.

Scott Arrol is the CEO of New Zealand Health IT (NZHIT).

If you want to contact eHealthNews.nz regarding this View, please email the editor Rebecca McBeth.

Read more Views/CIO Interviews:

Shayne Hunter: MoH View: ICT data and digital vital to stopping spread of Covid-19

Rebecca George: My View: Now is the time for Change

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