Labour and TOP support Health Digital Investment Plan

NEWS  - eHealthNews editor Rebecca McBeth

Three political parties are backing greater investment in digital health ahead of the election next month, with Labour and The Opportunity Party (TOP) saying they would retain and fund the Government's 10-year Health Digital Investment Plan.

Labour, Greens and The Opportunity Party have each set out their vision for digital health in eHealthNews, calling for stronger funding, better data security and more meaningful community input into how digital tools are used across the health system.

The seven key political parties vying to form the next government were asked to answer questions and contribute columns about their positions on the future of digital health. 

Three have responded and while they differ on approach, they generally agree that digital health is underfunded, understaffed and too often treated as an afterthought rather than essential infrastructure.

Labour health spokesperson Ayesha Verrall says that the data and digital workforce within Health New Zealand has reduced from a baseline of about 2,400 roles to 1,460, close to a 40 percent reduction. 

This is at the same time as the organisation is trying to deliver more services for more patients, but "you cannot do both,” she says.

Verrall says the $330 million cut from data and digital health initiatives in Budget 2024, including cybersecurity capability, "was exactly the wrong instinct: a false economy that would be wiped out by the cost of a single major breach or a prolonged outage”.

Green Party health spokesperson Hūhana Lyndon, also points to the data and digital staff cuts and a series of IT outages at hospitals across the motu that have forced already stretched staff to revert to pen and paper while continuing to deliver essential care.

“If we are going to implement digital health, we need to make sure we have the investment and infrastructure required to make this work, as well as processes in place to ensure that if outages do happen, our health system is not put under more pressure,” she says.

The Opportunity Party's Holly Knill says that because health runs on a three-year cycle, digital is the easiest part of it to defer. 

“It does not show up in a waiting list or an emergency department, so when a Budget gets tight it is the first line cut and the last restored,” she says.

Both Labour and TOP say they would retain the Government's Health Digital Investment Plan if elected, this sets out a sequenced roadmap for digital transformation over the next ten years.

Verrall supports much of the plan's ambition such as adopting core clinical systems, a national electronic medical record, radiology, cybersecurity foundations and virtually enabled care, but has concerns about delivery. 

"The initiatives are not funded, and the plan will never realise its promise on business cases alone," she says.

“I would keep the plan and fix what is missing: fund the initiatives, halt and reverse the attrition of digital expertise, enforce across public and private providers the security standards Labour introduced in 2022, properly resource the Privacy Commissioner and back the penalties he has called for, and structure procurement so local developers can compete,” she says.

Knill says there is a need for a stable, long-term funding horizon and calls for cross-party agreement on the plan's foundations so it can survive a change of government. 

"A digital build cannot migrate 6,000 systems, or keep the people who understand them, if it resets every time the government changes,” she says. 

She says TOP would fund the digital build required as capital infrastructure, sequenced over years inside the infrastructure envelope, rather than fought for each Budget. 

“Fund the standards, the interoperability work and the cybersecurity assurance from Vote Health, inside a staged path that lifts health spending to 9 percent of GDP and holds it there,” she says. 

Lyndon says that “if we are going to adopt digital health, we need to make sure it is something that we properly invest, resource and regulate” and emphasises the need for community input.

“We need to work with communities to identify where there are opportunities to use digital health, and where investment or continued use of non-digital systems remains better practice,” she says.

Read all three Views on eHealthNews.

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

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