Details of stopped/deferred health IT projects revealed

NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth 

Details of 136 data and digital projects at Health New Zealand | Te Whatu Ora that have been stopped or deferred since July 2024 have been released under OIA.

These include the go-live of the National Child Health Information Platform (NCHIP) at Counties Manukau, the BadgerNet Maternity clinical information system at Te Tai Tokerau Northland, a national eObservations project and a referrals and booking solution for the Central Region.

The OIA request, made by RNZ, reveals that of the 136 projects detailed, 71 were deferred and 65 stopped, though some have since been restarted and completed.

The documents released to RNZ and seen by eHealthNews, say that capital funding of $200 million for data and digital this financial year is not being reduced and matches the capital spend from the previous financial year.

This is in contrast to the operational budget for data and digital, which the organisation is consulting on reducing by $100 million annually as part of a wider savings drive.

In the May 2024 budget, $380 million of data and digital funding was also recalled pending new ‘investment-ready’ business cases.

In a letter accompanying the OIA release, acting chief information technology officer Darren Douglass describes the 2024/25 Data & Digital Capital Plan as a standard annual process and a ‘living document’, which is independent of the data and digital change proposal. 

While 136 projects were either stopped or deferred because of lower relative priority or poor cost/benefit ratios, this is in the context of 732 digital projects either already completed or in progress this financial year, he says.

“Decisions were based on mitigation of risk to critical systems, including cyber risk, clinical efficiency and safety, and cost-benefit. It is important to note that ‘stop/defer’ decisions do not introduce new clinical risks,” says Douglass in the letter. 

One of the deferred projects is the go-live of the National Child Health Information Platform (NCHIP) at Counties Manukau district. The system already covers most children up to age six living in Te Tai Tokerau Northland, Waitematā and Te Toka Tumai Auckland.

Paediatrician and clinical sponsor for NCHIP, Timothy Jelleyman, told eHealthNews last May that the platform has a wealth of information about children in the region that he can refer to in clinic and a 2024 paper showed use of the system in the Northern region was associated with a pro-equity impact during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Implementation of the BadgerNet Maternity clinical information system at Te Tai Tokerau Northland has also been deferred. 

The clinical system is being rolled out nationally and Te Tai Tokerau will be the last in the Northern Region to go-live, but this is now to be “revised as part of national maternity and neonates implementation approach”, the document says.

An eObservations project to establish a national Patientrak product team to develop an agreed national approach is on hold due to a funding prioritisation decision, as well as a consolidated referrals and booking solution for the Central Region.

The document says a proof of value to implement the Cortex care coordination platform on a ward at MidCentral to assess wider benefits is deferred “whilst license and future costs are fully understood”.

The system is already used at Christchurch and Burwood Hospitals, Nurse Maude Hospice, Greymouth’s Te Nīkau Hospital, Hawke’s Bay Hospital, and was also recently implemented at Ashburton Hospital.

Plans for an Anaesthesia Information Management System have also been deferred due to funding prioritisation, alongside eOrdering for Labs and Rads and the ICNet infection tracking solution.

eHealthNews reported in early 2021 that ten hospitals across the country were using ICNet to provide real time surveillance designed to prevent, detect and advise on infections such as Covid-19. 

A project to create a new environment for the sole use of Iwi Māori Partnership Boards (IMPBs) has been stopped, with a note saying it will be restarted when funding and scalability issue are addressed.

Work on the Localities digital environment is also stopped as national localities leadership advised it would not be appropriate to onboard new localities to the existing digital workspace as the expectations and model for the new localities are different to the prototypes and there are security issues related to scaling these.

Tranche two of the NHI format change, due by mid-2026, had been listed as stopped but has subsequently been completed as well as a CORE firewall replacement and server remediation project, amongst others.

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