Dispatch from the Digital Health Conference: Part two

NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

A brief summary of three presentations from the HiNZ Digital Health Conference 2022.

Ngāti Hine Health Trust uses Noted

Ngāti Hine Health Trust has 400 staff across 80 contracts, including 52 frontline. Rachel Henare, systems performance analyst at the Trust, said the organisation recognised that it needed a system to support it as it has grown and evolved.

The trust previously had siloed data across 12 systems, reporting processes that were often manual and unreliable, and no consistent practice across all teams, which all had varying technological capability.

“But our core problem was from a global perspective, we didn't know who were our whānau, where they were and what their needs were, therefore not really being able to tell if we were making a difference in a meaningful way,” she said.

The trust chose to move to Noted in order to integrate all of its teams onto one system with the ability to build integrated data discovery for contract reporting.

“They had an easy to use system and they were hungry and agile, willing to partner with us to create the solution that we needed,” Henare said in her presentation.

The project to deploy the solution at Ngāti Hine Health Trust began in May 2020 and all 52 teams were onboarded by July 2021, with issues presented by Covid-19 a constant presence.

Scott Pearson, chief strategy officer at Noted, said the onboarding of the teams was very successful, but the data discovery project was more challenging.

“We have delivered some key components including; the who are our whānau dashboards; data quality dashboards; operational dashboards, and all of the funder reports,” he said.

“Work is ongoing on other components, and we have started again in some areas where we have realised that our initial approach wasn't working very well.”

If you are registered for the Digital Health Conference, you can hear more about the project in the on-demand webcast library..

Cardiologists collaborate on AI

Cardiologists in the Te Manawa Taki region have collaborated with engineers specialising in Artificial Intelligence to design a number of data tools and systems to help improve patient heart health.

A centralised data lake (DataVaultForHealth) allows these applications to interact and patient data can be entered once, retrieved by connected applications and made available to all users.

A Patient Referral and Engagement Platform captures data for patients referred for cardiac surgery from the point of referral to discharge from hospital.

A Wait List Modelling tool has also been developed, which tracks patients on elective wait lists based on clinical acuity, ethnicity and time of referral and offers predictive modelling in line with resource constraints.

Special cardiologist at Waikato DHB, Rajesh Nair, said the Did Not Attend (DNA) rate for Māori for follow-up cardiology appointments is one out of five, compared to one out of 14 for non-Māori patients, indicating a barrier to access.

A Remote Health Evaluation and Information Management System provides digital health access for patients in the community.

It is a bilingual Telehealth application developed in English and Te Reo Māori for use by clinical nurse specialists to screen high risk patients in remote locations with real time specialist support from tertiary a cardiac centre.

“These projects illustrate a classic example where data engineers are able to collaborate with specialists to transform conventional data analytics to health informatics. That is where we get insights and this is crucially important for New Zealand’s public health services,” Nair said.

If you are registered for the Digital Health Conference, you can watch the full presentation here.

Eleven DHBs using Bowel Screening Register

Eleven DHBs have gone live with the National Screening Solution (NSS) Bowel Screening Register (BSR) over the past year.

Acting group manager National Screening Unit Stephanie Chapman told conference attendees the new system now supports around 400,000 participants for bowel cancer screening and, when available in all areas, it will support around 750,000 across New Zealand.

Two DHBs using the Bowel Screening Pilot register have also successfully migrated to the new cloud-based national solution, with eight still to make the transition.

“This is quite a tricky thing to do and needs to be managed really carefully because we are transitioning at the point when patients are mid-flight through their screening journey,” Chapman said.

“We need to make sure we don’t lose anyone at a critical stage and that all the people who live in the old system are live in the new system.”

If you are registered for the Digital Health Conference, you can watch the full presentation here.


To comment on or discuss this news story, go to the eHealthNews category on the HiNZ eHealth Forum

Read more Clinical Software news

Return to eHealthNews.nz home page