Janine Bycroft: Clinical Informatics Leadership Award 2022 finalist

eHealthNews.nz: Clinical Informatics

Janine Bycroft: Clinical Informatics Leadership Award 2022 finalist

Sunday, 6 November 2022

Share |

PROFILE - Janine Bycroft, executive director, Health Navigator Charitable Trust and Associate Clinical Director at ProCare

Judges’ quote
“Bycroft's leadership and hard work will have positively impacted on literally hundreds of thousands people via the online provision of health information. Stakeholder engagement is exhausting, frustrating work, but year after year, she is dogged in her graceful determination to keep doing it. Few do it as well.”

Nominator’s quote
“Bycroft is passionate about the use of digital health to improve access, timeliness of care, shared decision-making and mana-enhancing models of care to contribute to Te Whatu Ora ‒ Health New Zealand's goal to "transform health to … address the persistent inequalities experienced by Māori, ensure greater access, experience and outcomes for those traditionally not well served by the system.”

You’ve read this article for free, but good journalism takes time and resource to produce. Please consider supporting eHealthNews by becoming a member of HiNZ, for just $17 a month.

Profile
Janine Bycroft is the founder and chief executive for the Health Navigator Charitable Trust and the visionary behind multiple initiatives to improve long-term condition management, telehealth and digital health

She is a member of the National Telehealth Forum Leadership Group and the Whakarongorau Aotearoa /National Telehealth Service Clinical Governance Committee.

Bycroft's work to found and develop NZ's foremost national health information website is her best-known achievement. She developed the Health Navigator NZ website and Trust in response to the need for one place to find trustworthy content and support whānau and healthcare providers with 24/7 access to the right information at that moment it's needed.

Traffic to the website is now over 1.7 million pageviews per month and is the go-to digital health resource for clinicians and the NZ public

In 2016, Bycroft established the NZ Health App Library, now providing independent reviews for over 200 health and hauora apps.

Her latest national initiative is the development of quality standards and a digital health accreditation pathway.

She has fostered relationships with global leaders in digital solution assessment and activation to increase collaboration and alignment with international best practice. This led to identifying several areas not covered internationally that are important for the NZ context.

To address this gap, she recently led her team in running a series of workshops to co-design the Aotearoa Enhanced Review (AER). With expert NZ input from clinicians, data sovereignty, ethics, technology and cybersecurity to cultural advisors and whānau with lived experience, the AER development positions NZ as a world leader in cultural safety within the digital health space.

Stakeholder Engagement
Bycroft's credibility as a highly respected practising GP and knowledge of public health are key factors in her ability to understand and engage with a broad range of healthcare providers.

She often reminds groups that whānau are the largest untapped workforce. She set up the Health Consumer Advisory Service for the Ministry of Health Long-Term Conditions team to ensure a stronger voice for whānau in service design and execution.

Whether promoting the adoption of digital tools, patient portals, Open Notes or video consultations, her ability to relate to the day-to-day challenges of clinical care, the importance of integration with clinical workflow and providing practical examples of scenarios and case studies, have been key enablers for improving user uptake, understanding and participation.

Her work to create a national content hub is one of her biggest efforts to date. She has engaged with dozens of organisations to partner in an initiative to build a national health content hub and collaborative, which would act as a central digital repository for trusted, New Zealand-focused, high-quality health content and self-care resources.

Benefits from the hub will be extensive, from improved access and applicability to more equitable outcomes for Māori, Pasifika, people with disabilities and other high-needs populations, who will be prioritised for content co-creation, development and delivery.

Competence and Capability
As an advocate for collaborative care, care planning, integrated care and increased consumer participation in service design and planning, Bycroft is a regular presenter and panellist at a number of conferences and webinars, and is a regular promoter of Open Notes and telehealth.

She has helped develop modules to support health providers gain confidence delivering telehealth and was part of a group supporting Aotearoa Collaborative to develop a telehealth curriculum and online course.

For the wider public, Bycroft and the team developed a range of telehealth and Covid-19 resources for consumers and shared through the Health Navigator NZ website.