Health Sector Agreements and Payments programme ROI released

eHealthNews.nz: Infrastructure

Health Sector Agreements and Payments programme ROI released

Sunday, 4 July 2021

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NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

The new Health Sector Agreements and Payments (HSAAP) programme will be delivered over the next three years and involve the decommissioning of more than ten legacy systems.

Budget 2021 assigned funding of up to $116 million to transform the Ministry’s current systems. These manage payment of around $10 billion across 92 million transactions a year, to service providers on behalf of the Crown and District Health Boards.

The Ministry of Health has released a Registration of Interest, saying the current HSAAP system relies on three core solutions that were developed during 1998 - 2001 and cannot accommodate the level of change anticipated in the Health and Disability System review.

“Over the past few years maintenance spending on HSAAP has been deprioritised, and with continuing system changes this has led to a complex and aged ecosystem that presents ongoing operational risk and increasing system outages,” the ROI documents say.

“Such risks may impact payments to specific providers of community-based health care, or potentially lead to a total system failure impacting all funders and providers that rely on the system.”

Shayne Hunter, deputy director-general of data and digital, has described the current payments systems as “no longer fit for purpose”, saying the three separate systems are inflexible and poorly integrated with each other, and the associated processes rely heavily on manual data entry.

“The investment through Budget 2021 will see the development of a modern and responsive payments system with significantly shorter payment cycles and more timely, accessible and accurate data for all system users, including those who fund, provide and use healthcare,” he told eHealthNews.nz.

The ROI calls for suppliers with experience as a system integrator (SI) / business integrator (BI) to provide advice and innovation to the HSAAP programme.

“The Systems Integrator role is responsible for pulling together the disparate technology components of the HSAAP systems into a coherent whole by managing the combination of outputs of various workstreams and underlying systems,” it says.

“The role of the Business Integrator is to ensure that the expectations of the business owners are met over the period of the programme and to hold the entire organisation (including the programme and partners) to account in maximising the value generated from the investment.”

The project will include decommissioning a number of legacy systems, including the Contract Management System, Client Claim Processing System, Capitated Funding Databases and Online Pharmacy Claiming.

The ROI says there will be a phased implementation approach to mitigate risks and the programme will be delivered across three funding tranches, with final delivery of Tranche Three on 30 June 2024.

Responses are due by midday July 30 2021.