Innovation to focus on freeing workforce capacity

NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

Health innovation must be relentlessly focused on reducing friction and freeing up capacity, not adding to the strain on clinicians, says chief data and digital at Health New Zealand | Te Whatu Ora.

Leigh Donoghue presented at the Digital Health Leadership Summit in Wellington on May 14 where he quoted from a research paper saying that innovations contribute substantially to health care's capacity problems, as every innovation requires more infrastructure and more time for the people delivering health care.

He said the pace of innovation is outstripping the workforce’s capacity to deliver those when health professionals globally are already in short supply and there is low workforce morale.

The conclusion is that “healthcare needs a new chassis... something that lifts us, that removes and reduces the friction and allows us to move faster and more effectively to learn and improve, and I'm talking about truly tech-enabled healthcare”.

“Tech-enabled transformed care must also deliver a sense of hope to the providers currently experiencing unrelenting demand for their services,” quoted Donoghue.

While the first two years of Health NZ have been focused on transitioning and bringing together 29 entities into a national organisation, the next is about care modernisation. This means taking complexity out of the health system, converging and simplifying the system landscape.

“This is the new chassis that will enable a large scale service transformation that meets the wider needs and aspirations of our community,” Donoghue said.

“We are not waiting, we are starting: we do not have all the money, we do not have all the people, nor do we have all the skills. Nonetheless, we have started. We are working towards this, and making significant progress.”

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Some important decisions around platforms have already been made, such as Snowflake for the new National Data Platform, SailPoint for digital identity access and ServiceNow for the national help desk.

“With the latest deployment, we now have 9000 people supported through our national helpdesk and we are rolling it out for our entire workforce by the end of June,” he said.

Decisions and changes made today can both help improve productivity and provide hope for clinicians. He cited primary care as an area where this is needed: where technology can lighten the load and help make general practice an attractive prospect for new medical graduates to enter in the future.

Tools such as generative AI that help transcribe patient notes can save significant time every day, reduce the cognitive load on GPs and allow staff to get home earlier.

“This is the type of application of technology, removing the strain on doctors and rekindling hope,” he said.

Donoghue said it is a hard task to modernise the health system, but that “we cannot shy away from some of the realities that we are dealing with”.

An example of this is the myriad of legacy and mixed capability roster-to-pay systems which mean nearly 40 percent of Health New Zealand staff are being paid by systems that are end of life in June next year.

He said some frontline staff are rostering with excel spreadsheets and with paper, which meant past funding had to go towards strengthening the concrete floor of a Wellington building in order to hold paper time sheets, when “money would be better spent on digitising.”

It will take enormous collective effort to change the health system and “we need a movement for change”, Donoghue told the Summit.

“Change is coming and we have to do this in a way that frees up cost. No one will provide us with buckets of money, so we have to be relentlessly focused on how we reduce the friction, free up capacity, enable clinicians to be more effective and reinvest in our health system.”


Picture: Leigh Donoghue, chief data and digital, Health New Zealand Te Whatu Ora, speaking at the 2024 HiNZ Digital Health Leadership Summit

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