‘Order and discipline’ to be imposed on health tech spend – Rob Campbell

eHealthNews.nz: National Systems & Strategy

‘Order and discipline’ to be imposed on health tech spend – Rob Campbell

Monday, 12 December 2022

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NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

Te Whatu Ora – Health NZ will focus its technology spend on solutions “which bring immediate, measurable benefits, and which promote our equity and efficiency objectives”, board chair Rob Campbell says.

Campbell gave a keynote address at Digital Health Week NZ 2022 in Rotorua, where he talked about Te Whatu Ora’s goal of ‘unify to simplify’, which he described as “not centralisation for its own sake, but simply to get understanding and control of the health services we inherited.

“We do not and will not have much money to spend on new technologies. That means we have to prioritise those which bring immediate, measurable benefits, and which promote our equity and efficiency objectives,” Campbell said.

“To get to that point we have to sort through a veritable haystack of projects and impose some order and discipline on the process of technology spend.

“The key skill will be finding those which serve our objectives, and resisting the temptation to adopt the next technology, or the best promoted technology, rather than the one that we really need.”

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Campbell talked about a health system built around flexible, more dispersed facilities that support new models of care.

He said Te Whatu Ora is striving towards a better informed, more efficient, more cooperative health services system and that change will occur with gradual improvement over the next few years.

“This will inevitably mean stopping some things we currently do: it will involve reorganisation and loss of some jobs.”

He told the audience there will be pain in the change, and this will hurt.

“We're not here to administer the past, but to create the future, and that will include new and better pathways through less traditional routes,” said Campbell.

“Our national regional and local leadership has to be bold. The biggest risks we face are not trying things and failing, the biggest risks are those of inaction or excessive caution.”

The six months since Te Whatu Ora was created in July 2022, “has been an intensely active time, but it's also been intensely frustrating”, he told the packed auditorium.

“We must make the health reforms bigger, deeper and faster than they're going at the moment,” Campbell said.

“We are not yet making anything like the progress which the crises in our health services demand, or … taking anything like full advantage of the opportunities which the Pae Ora legislation has created.

“It's not straightforward to change things deeply and quickly, because we inherited all of the practices of the past and because promoting substantive change and efficiency and equity was never part of those practices that we inherited.”

Resistance to change means the Te Whatu Ora board has to “see ourselves as activists, not as monitors”.

“Within our management teams, we've got varying levels of skill and enthusiasm for effecting radical change,” he told the conference.

“That means that from the board we have to lead and drive change, picking out the best people to do it with”.

Campbell talked about a health service system that is not genuinely accountable, “where there are literally thousands of piecemeal initiatives, and no doubt more than an equal number of non-initiatives”, and said that cannot be allowed to continue or to replicate itself.

Te Whatu Ora’s private and non-government sector partners and suppliers needed to relearn ways of doing things as, “too many are trying to replicate their old relationships”.

He said the health system has an abundance of poor information, that is of low quality and is not cohesively put together, and “we need to get accurate, timely and relevant information available to decision makers at all levels to make sound decisions”.

More than 1000 people attended Digital Health Week NZ 2022 in Rotorua this December, which is delivered by Health Informatics NZ (HiNZ).