NZ implements digital border system

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eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

New Zealand is implementing a fully digital, integrated national border system, making it a world leader in this space.

A raft of digital systems have been developed and rolled out by the Ministry of Health to support a paperless border system that records and links people’s arrival into the country through to their managed isolation stay, Covid-19 testing requests and results and national reporting.

Michael Hosking presented at the Australasian session of the Digital Health Institute Virtual Summit earlier this month on the digital solutions supporting the country’s border process.

Hosking, who is the national digital lead – Covid-19 response with Auckland DHB, said the
overarching solution supporting the process is called BorderNet, which is the Border System for Notifiable Exposure and Travel Related Infectious Diseases. 

This covers; the National Border Solution, which is part of the National Contact Tracing Solution and sits on Salesforce; the new Border Clinical Management System, which sits on indici; the Notifiable Orders and Results Repository, managed by Sysmex Eclair; and the border work and testing component that sits on Salesforce. 

Javad Ahmed, president of technical services at Valentia Technologies, which owns indici, says New Zealand’s fully paperless integrated system is very advanced and well ahead of what he has seen globally.

“There are a number of checks and balances in place to enable a seamless flow of information between isolation facilities, border control, labs, ESR and individuals themselves so that mistakes can be avoided,” he tells eHealthNews.nz.

Hosking told conference viewers that the country’s National Contact Tracing Solution has a border register application that supports the registration of a guest into a managed isolation facility, their room and their departure.

The Border Clinical Management System is going live over the next week and supports the point of check-in to the point of check-out in terms of health and includes work lists and task management, health checks, clinical care from a Covid and a non-Covid perspective and ePrescribing,. 

The clinical system supports referral between facilities and there is “going to be bidirectional view access between primary and secondary care so the facilities can access hospital systems and primary care systems, and vice versa”, Hosking told viewers. 

The Border Clinical Management System also tightly integrates with Eclair to support Covid-19 testing, collection and results management. 

When a guest arrives at the facility and checks in, the border system feeds a snapshot of information collected at the airport into the Border Clinical Management System, which allows the workers at the facility to verify the person, Hosking explained. 

The guest is provided with a National Health Index (NHI) number barcode, which is printed, or provided electronically to the guest so that they can present it at testing. 

“That also updates the central NHI database to ensure that the verification of that data is accurate, because a lot of these guests are coming back home from overseas after a long trip away,” he said. 

The test schedule of the day three and day 11 tests is sent to the results management system to pre-empt the order for those days.

When a test is being done, the nurse will login to their phone using a pin and scan the guest’s NHI barcode via a mobile application to do a positive patient identification.

They scan the swab tube and link the guests with the tube, do the test, then rescan the tube to ensure it's the same sample.

“That sends an eOrder off to the lab, as a pre-emptive, that the swab is coming.”

The lab processes those tests and the test status is sent to the border register for reporting purposes, to notify whether the test has been done or not.

A negative result is sent to the guest via text message. 

“If it’s a positive result, that's escalated through the contact tracing component to say there's a positive case for the contact tracing team to manage and contact the guest directly to determine their movements and context,” he explained. 

All of the results are sent to the National Registry of Results for Notifiable Diseases and are viewable by the workers across the Border Clinical Management System.

Read more about the Border Clinical Management System going live across the country in News.

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

Read more news:

National Contact Tracing Solution gets development funding
Digital register to track border worker testing status

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