Health NZ lacks clear view of critical digital systems, RFI reveals

NEWS  - eHealthNews editor Rebecca McBeth

Health New Zealand | Te Whatu Ora does not have a consistent consolidated view of the health and performance of its critical digital systems, limiting its ability to detect and respond to service disruptions early, a new Request for Information (RFI) says.

The organisation has issued an RFI to look at how to improve visibility of its critical digital services, enable earlier detection of issues, and support faster diagnosis and resolution of service disruptions for its “complex and highly distributed technology environment” across national, regional, cloud, and on-premises platforms.

Health NZ has dealt with a number of system issues this year, including a 12-hour outage overnight on January 28 affecting clinical and operational systems at hospitals across the Northern region.

Waikato Hospitals experienced a major outage in July and Southern hospitals have also been impacted by outages, including two in January of this year, with failures forcing clinicians to resort to paper when they could not access critical systems.

Digital Services acting chief information technology officer Darren Douglass says the RFI is focused on Category 1 and Category 2 clinical applications within the Health NZ landscape, which is around 1,300 operational service records represented by around 867 unique applications.

Douglass says multiple service records may exist for the same application where it is deployed, operated, or managed separately across districts, regions, or service domains.

He gives the example of clinical portals as a single application which is implemented and managed independently across five regions, resulting in five service records.

The RFI says there are a range of monitoring capabilities in place and monitoring approaches, tooling, and coverage vary significantly between environments. 

“Current monitoring capabilities do not consistently provide a consolidated view of a service’s health, performance, dependencies, and failure conditions across critical systems,” it says.

This means service degradation or failure may not always be identified as early as possible and there is an opportunity to improve the speed of detection, diagnosis, and restoration of systems.

Category 1 systems are highly critical services supporting clinical care delivery, patient information management, and national health services while Category 2 covers operational, integration, corporate, and supporting services where degradation or failure may result in material operational impact. 

The RFI says Health NZ is looking for centralised visibility of service health and performance as well as proactive detection of degradation and performance issues “before it materially impacts users, patients, or operational services”.

Also, faster incident resolution, integration with existing service management and incident management processes and enhanced visibility of application performance, transactions, dependencies, and end-user experience across critical services.

Responses are due by 25 September 2026.

If you would like to provide feedback on this news story, please contact the editor Rebecca McBeth.

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