NZHIT View: Introducing Hauora, Mauri Ora

VIEW - Kate Reid, NZHIT chair and Director of Digital Health, Deloitte

Today, there is an opportunity to recapture the position New Zealand once held as a global leader in digital health innovation. 

Together, we can enable improvement in the delivery of all healthcare services, helping address the issues of equity of access and equitable outcomes, while fostering a digital health industry that supports these changes, and is well positioned globally. 

NZHIT’s more than 165 members all share the same ambition - to enable a healthier New Zealand.

Our network brings together the custodianship over nearly all of the health IT data across New Zealand and with that comes enormous responsibility, to ensure that the safe and appropriate use of that data, but also the enormous opportunity to enhance the use of digital technologies to improve health and wellbeing for every New Zealander.

That is why we commissioned the report, Hauora, Mauri Ora: Enabling a Healthier Aotearoa New Zealand which was launched in Parliament on April 7.

The report’s recommendations encompass a sector wide approach, because this is not about NZHIT members doing this alone, but about a sector working collaboratively across all of our recommendations to bring about this change for good.

This ‘moment in time’ opportunity could see Aotearoa New Zealand create a health and disability system that will have the world eager to adopt our enabling solutions. 

Currently, the New Zealand Health and Disability System is challenged with inequities in access to healthcare and in equality of health outcomes. 

Growing demand and consumer expectations, increased costs for new treatments and medicines, an ageing workforce, and the historical lack of investment in digital infrastructure are among the pressures highlighted by last year’s New Zealand Health and Disability Review. 

At the same time, New Zealand has a burgeoning digital health industry, demonstrated by the more than 165 members of our industry association. 

We are now beginning to witness significant shifts in the traditional models of care, from an almost total focus on providing healthcare, to wellbeing, consumer empowerment and the reduction in demand on our already stretched resources. 

While diseases and injuries will never be completely eliminated, we will be able, through science, data, and technology, to identify and diagnose earlier, intervene proactively through these new approaches, and better understand management and recovery pathways to enable consumers to more effectively and actively sustain their wellbeing. 

It follows that a renewed focus on digital health presents us with the opportunity to enable, support and accelerate the changes the sector recognises as being essential if we are to move beyond an acceptance of the status quo and its implicit shortcomings. 

This constraint is further compounded by a low level of digital literacy in the sector, systemic impediments to innovation, disabling procurement processes, and the slow progress being made to provide New Zealanders with equitable access to their health data and supporting technology.

There are many successful examples of truly cross-sectional health in action, however there is much more to do. NZHIT is committed to representing our industry and collaborating with other stakeholders across the sector to realise a fully co-ordinated nationwide approach.

NZHIT represents organisations from across the sector, each with ideas, experience, and solutions that, if harnessed for the common good, would enable a step change in the health and wellbeing of New Zealanders. 

Watch Kate Reid’s speech at the launch event here.

Kate Reid is the chair of New Zealand Health IT (NZHIT).