Innovation key to health system transformation

eHealthNews.nz: National Systems & Strategy

Thursday, 2 June 2022

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NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

2022 Budget The new structure of the health system will provide significant opportunities for innovation, says senior member of the Health Transition Programme, Claire Braatvedt.

Braatvedt spoke at a Canterbury Health Innovation event at WebTools in Christchurch on May 31 and said the data and digital team going into Health NZ believes strongly in innovation being a key component of transformation.

“All of the progress towards connectivity and equity and person-centred care … is going to come out of innovation and it’s going to come out of local innovation,” she told the audience.

Under the newly reformed health system, Health NZ will manage a chain of national hospitals and commission all of the primary and community care.

The new Māori Health Authority sits across delivery and strategy. It will commission Māori health services and ensure the system meets the needs and priorities of Māori.

Braatvedt said the new structure is exciting from a data and digital perspective as it provides scale to attract international providers and to scale up local innovation to a “reasonable and sustainable size”.

“We need to foster the culture of innovation that already exists and create a culture of collaboration and scaling,” she said.

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Locality commissioners will develop plans which are designed around what the community wants, which will encourage local innovation.

Some key priorities for data and digital have come out of the development of a New Zealand Health Plan.

One of these is around amplifying innovation across the health system, which involves looking at “how do we scale the innovation that we know is already in place in our healthcare system?”

Another key priority is the creation of a world leading digital health industry.

“We have a whole priority dedicated to making New Zealand a place that people in the digital health space want to operate in, and we are looking at how do we work more effectively with the market and partners to achieve that?” Braatvedt said.

Other priorities include; wider health system adoption of digital technology; trusted and secure health information; uplifting digital maturity across the system; digital enablement of the workforce; building the care settings of the future; modern health intelligence functions; and digital empowerment for consumers and whānau.

She said the Health Transition Programme data and digital team has been primarily focused on day one of the reforms, which is July 1 of this year.

This includes ensuring continuity of services, including digital services and capabilities , as well as setting up Health NZ, the Māori health authority, and the Ministry of Health, with the data and digital capabilities they need to operate on day one.

“As day one comes and passes imminently, we are going to shift that focus on to how do we realise the objectives that this reform is signalling . This requires us to shift into a new way of working, so that we can operationalise some of this from a data and digital perspective,” she said.

The data and digital team are co-creating a new digital operating model for Health NZ, guided by a working group of independent, market and sector members. This will be supported by a transformation roadmap and a refreshed data and digital investment strategy,

“We know that the way that we invest as a health system in data and digital is pretty fragmented: it's quite inconsistent, sometimes difficult to navigate, and it certainly doesn't promote partnership and collaboration with industry,” she said.

“And there's a lot that can be done there and there's a commitment to refreshing how that operates.”

Picture: Interim Health NZ logo