Clinical informaticians needed to lift digital literacy in health – Shane Reti
Monday, 5 June 2023
NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth
 New Zealand’s health system needs a critical mass of clinical informaticians to lift digital literacy and maturity across the system, says National’s health spokesperson Shane Reti.
Reti spoke to the 220-strong audience at the HiNZ Digital Health Leadership Summit in Wellington on May 31 where he described his background in clinical informatics.
Formerly a Northland GP, he was awarded a Harkness Fellowship to Harvard, in Boston, in 2007, where he was chief operating officer and professor at the Division of Clinical Informatics.
“I'm clearly a convert to clinical informatics: that interface between clinical medicine, information technology, and business,” he said.
“We don't have anywhere enough clinical informaticians in the health system in New Zealand.”
Reti said he used the Official Information Act to get the results of the HIMSS digital maturity assessments completed at eight DHBs in 2021 and these were a “sobering reminder of the amount of work we have got to do”.
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The HIMSS assessments score hospitals and care settings on their adoption and use of electronic medical records on a scale from 0–7.
He said greater numbers of clinical informaticians might have led to different results in these assessments and the health sector needs to be at a much higher level across the board, before thinking about implementing a national Electronic Health Record (EHR).
“While it is a nice tagline and aspiration to say there should be one ubiquitous health record across the country, there is a need to first lift the baseline of digital literacy nationwide,” Reti said.
“The goal that interests me is raising IT literacy through more clinical implementations, and this aspiration will require some critical mass of clinical informaticians: I'm interested in the former and I'm prepared to pay for the latter.”
He said good implementation comes down to three things he called the three Ps – people, parts and policies.
“You need to have the health resource to be able to implement it, you need to be able to give people the tools and the equipment for what they're implementing, then you need policies to support that implementation progress,” said Reti.
“Overlaying that is political leadership: having clinical leadership and a senior sponsor is absolutely vital.”
Picture: National Party Health spokesperson, Shane Reti
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