Health New Zealand | Te Whatu Ora must overhaul how it procures and manages third-party digital services before procuring any future digital solution for sharing hospital discharge information with patients.

Privacy Commissioner Michael Webster has issued both Health NZ and Manage My Health (MMH) with Compliance Notices for failing to comply with the security requirements of rule 5 of the Health Information Privacy Code.

Health NZ’s notice says it has until the end of January 2027 to implement a project plan addressing governance, privacy risk management, information security, and contracting processes in order to prevent unauthorised use or disclosure of patient health information by or through third-party service providers.

The notice follows the Privacy Commissioner's inquiry into the MMH cyber security breach on 31 December 2025 which resulted in the private health information of 99,000 New Zealanders being accessed, stolen and put up for sale. Around 91 percent of those affected were Health NZ patients in Northland.

"These Compliance Notices will ensure, and confirm to me, that Manage My Health and Health NZ are treating patient data securely and it will give New Zealanders assurance that we take these breaches seriously and that strengthening systems is vitally important," says Webster.

The Commissioner found that Health NZ did not conduct sufficient due diligence before engaging MMH and there were “serious problems with the quality of the privacy risk assessments”.

“The way in which the MMH system would manage the information provided by Health NZ was insufficiently understood by Health NZ and key technical issues were not identified,” the notice says.

“The breach of the Code was particularly serious, given the sensitivity of the affected health information and the resulting cyber security breach having impacted public trust and confidence in the health sector’s use of patient portals.”

Health NZ must consult with the OPC before any replacement project is implemented, and must review privacy impact assessments prior to any expansion of scope beyond the Northland region.

Bevan McKenzie, Health NZ chief financial officer, says the organisation is doing assurance assessments of patient portals, including MMH, and work is progressing on a third party risk management framework and an incident response guide. 

“Health NZ is taking a risk-based approach to this work, beginning with patient portals and building more consistent assurance processes for higher-risk third-party services across Health NZ,” he says.

“The specific arrangement under which Northland hospital discharge information was provided through Manage My Health has already ceased”.

The Commissioner's inquiry identified seven areas where MMH’s security protections were ineffective at the time of the breach.

These are; multifactor authentication (MFA), identity and access management, web security, patch and vulnerability management, system acquisition and development, logging and monitoring, and data leak prevention.

Since the incident, MMH has already addressed three of those areas, improving MFA controls, restricting user access to information and controlling unauthorised external access.

The notice gives MMH a deadline of 31 August 2027 to complete the remaining work.

Image: Privacy Commissioner Michael Webster

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Educational futurist and founder of academyEx, Frances Valintine, will deliver a keynote address at the Digital Health Week Conference 2026, focusing on how artificial intelligence is changing roles across the health workforce and what clinicians and leaders can do to navigate that shift.

Taking place this 18 - 19 November in Manukau Auckland, the conference is the largest of its kind in the country, attracting around 1,200 attendees from across the health and technology sector.

Valintine says the most immediate gains from AI in health are in non-clinical areas such as administration, operations, and patient management. 

This includes reduced duplication of paperwork, better identification of data issues and improved operational planning such as using AI to identify patterns in hospital demand that people have not previously been able to detect.

She argues that a basic understanding of AI is now a contemporary requirement across all roles, regardless of seniority or clinical function.

"Any career in any environment now will have differing levels of AI competency required, there is a basic need to understand it as a contemporary part of actually doing business,” she explains.

However, organisations should not adopt AI just because it exists and must always start with the outcome they are looking to achieve.

Valintine says there are three types of AI adoption; substitution, where tasks previously done by humans are taken over by AI; augmentation, where AI supports human decision-making in a collaborative way; and intensification, where AI is deployed more heavily in areas where the benefits are clearest.

To move from small pilots to full deployment needs buy-in from IT, security, privacy, procurement, and operational staff, and that this complexity is part of why many organisations have been slow adopters, she explains.

Valintine adds that the health system faces a fundamental challenge before AI can deliver on its promise, which is that the data underpinning it needs significant work.

"The World Economic Forum has talked about the fact that health data in the world is the most abundant of any form of data and yet 97 percent of it is unusable, either through privacy or it is not in a format that can be used so it needs a huge amount of work," she says.

academyEX is a key knowledge partner to Health New Zealand for its health leadership programme, which reaches around 1,700 staff each year. 

Valintine says that concerns about AI among clinicians are legitimate and understandable, but the key is to focus on what tools can enable the best outcomes for patients.

Register now to hear Frances Valintine and the great line-up of speakers at the Digital Health Week conference 2026.

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New Zealand's Cancer Control Agency Te Aho o Te Kahu, has successfully trialled an AI-assisted structured pathology reporting system that converts histology findings directly into fully coded structured data, and is preparing for its second phase.

John Fountain, data and analytics manager at Te Aho o Te Kahu, presented on ASAP (AI-assisted Structured Anatomical Pathology reporting) at the HiNZ Digital Health AI Summit where he said it significantly improves on the manual coding process that leaves the New Zealand Cancer Register months behind.

Pathology findings are traditionally sent from laboratories as unstructured text, which clinical coders must read, interpret, and manually translate into codes for registers and databases. 

This process is slow, resource-intensive, and replicated across multiple organisations that need structured cancer data, such as BreastScreen Aotearoa and the Breast Cancer Foundation NZ.

"Text is not data: we cannot use text directly for analytics, we cannot use text to auto-populate other systems that clinicians can interact with, and text basically must be read if you want to actually understand what is going on,” explained Fountain.

The trial, supported by Deloitte, AWS, and Health New Zealand, produced 117 fully coded data reports.
ASAP was developed using national interoperability standards - FHIR for data exchange and SNOMED CT for clinical terminology - to produce structured, coded outputs that are clinician-verified. 

It uses Te Aho o Te Kahu's national cancer data platform CanShare, which sits across a FHIR-based HealthLake platform within Health New Zealand and a Snowflake environment used for analytics.

The AI component involves AI scribe Tui, which converts the pathologists’ speech to text, then maps that text to SNOMED CT codes. The pathologist reviews the structured output before it is verified and sent through the system.

Coding accuracy during the trial was close to 100 percent said Fountain. However, the pathologists involved in the trial did not want to use the AI scribe as they preferred structured forms for them to follow.

"The takeaway message is you need to fit your solution to the clinical need, what the clinicians want, not replace the norm,” he told attendees.

The next phase, ASAP 2, will expand the scope to the full clinical data loop, from surgical request through to pathology report and into multidisciplinary meetings (MDMs).

Under this model, surgeons would submit coded requests to pathologists, pre-populated with relevant clinical information, and surgical notes would also feed into the system. The resulting structured data would then flow into MDMs, reducing the time needed for staff to prepare information for these meetings.

“Clinicians want instant gratification, so if their forms have been pre-auto-populated with information from the person that first collected data, it makes life easy,” Fountain said.

The Summit presentation was on September 17 in Christchurch.

Image: John Fountain, data and analytics manager at Te Aho o Te Kahu

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The Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners is trialling an AI-supported learning platform with a targeted group of GP registrars. 

The College is partnering with Gestalt, a New Zealand-built clinical reasoning platform, to test the tool with a select cohort of registrars, including a group of International Medical Graduates.  

Registrars will complete simulated consultations through Gestalt's platform and receive individualised feedback, creating additional opportunities for independent practice between their regular supervised sessions. 

College chief executive Toby Beaglehole says the pilot is focused on understanding where AI genuinely adds value to specialist general practice training, rather than assuming it does. 

"AI could give registrars more opportunities to practise and learn," Beaglehole says.  

"We need evidence that it works in the real training environment, and that it supports the standards and relationships at the heart of general practice. 

"This pilot will show us where the technology helps, where it does not, and what safe, useful adoption looks like." 

Gestalt co-founder, chief executive and college fellow Alastair Dunne says the platform is built to extend and amplify the learning that medical educators already provide. 

"Practice, feedback and reflection are critical to developing clinical skills," Dunne says.  

"This partnership will test how AI can give learners more of those opportunities alongside established education programmes." 

The platform has been built on a proprietary medical knowledge graph covering around 3,000 medical conditions and more than 500,000 interlinking terms. 

Dunne tells eHealthNews it was built to simulate patient consultations, giving medical students a low-stakes environment to practise clinical reasoning. The College saw the potential of simulated consultation practice for its registrars, noting that they have different learning needs from undergraduate students. 

“We have also built an educator overview for the College facilitators to track the learning needs of their groups, helping them better target their facilitated sessions,” he says. 

Dunne says the tool is designed to supplement, not replace, clinical placements as well as amplify and not replace educators.   

Following the pilot, the College will assess registrar engagement, user experience and educator feedback before deciding whether AI-supported learning should have a wider role in its training programmes.  
Image: College chief executive Toby Beaglehole

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Technology is the most powerful lever available to improve health outcomes, Health New Zealand | Te Whatu Ora board chair Mark Darrow says.

"Our destination is not better technology, the destination is better care, but it is technology, digital, and AI that can help us get there," he told the HiNZ Digital Health AI Summit in Ōtautahi Christchurch on September 17.

Darrow is five months into his role as Chair and spoke about the strategic direction the new Board is setting, and the central role digital plays in that.

He described Online GP appointments, same-day video consultations, AI-assisted prescription and referral systems, robotic surgery, and AI image analysis as tools being used to help deliver care.

“Technology is the biggest opportunity, more than anything else, to make a real difference to health outcomes, and will do so more efficiently than any other lever we have to pull,” he said.

Darrow said the past five to six years of ongoing disruption has left the health system with a "profound legacy debt" across infrastructure, skills, and technology.

The organisation runs 20 different payroll systems and five different recruitment systems, and is still working through historic holiday pay issues in two hospital districts, a process that has been going on for a decade.

He said the Board has approved a technology pathway to invest in an integrated digital platform covering finance, workforce and supply chain functions.

A new Digital Transformation Committee has also been established to oversee delivery of the Health Digital Investment Plan (HDIP), which would be New Zealand’s largest every technology project.

Darrow described the HDIP as a bold plan, but said it is "largely currently an unfunded ambitious goal that lacks specificity and needs a lot more work."

The plan covers radiology modernisation, cloud transformation, clinical desktop modernisation, cybersecurity, data analytics capability, and digital infrastructure.

He said as part of the Digital Committee's creation the digital team was asked to name their central goal and the answer was “one patient, one record”.

"My next question was, what has to be true to achieve that? I know this is not a new question or a new ambition, this has been going on for decades, but we have to finally face up to that as the truism that we have to create,” he told the Summit.

Darrow said the Board is finalising a new organisational strategy, what they call a North Star, that sets out what Health New Zealand is trying to achieve for patients, the workforce, and the wider health system.

“Digital and AI need to support and enable that direction: they are tools to help deliver better care, better access, and better outcomes for New Zealanders - not the destination in themselves,” he said.

"If there was ever a time we needed leadership, clear thinking, collaboration, and to operate as one system, now is surely that time.”

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Police are investigating and Health New Zealand is supporting a Dunedin-based clinical trial service provider as it responds to a cyber incident in which it appears health information has been stolen and posted online.

Zenith Technology, or ZenTech, is a privately owned and operated Dunedin-based contract research organisation (CRO) involved in clinical-trial related work with Health NZ and the wider health sector.

A Health New Zealand spokesperson says the organisation was made aware of a cyber incident after files attributed to ZenTech were identified online.

Health New Zealand is supporting the CRO with its response and ZenTech has also engaged specialist cyber forensic support.

“There is no impact on Health NZ digital systems, and hospitals and primary care providers are operating as normal,” the Health NZ spokesperson says.

“We recognise the public interest in this incident and the concern cyber events can cause. Our priority is to ensure the response is thorough, coordinated and based on verified information.”

Health NZ says the right agencies and specialist experts are involved, and the situation is being actively managed through established national incident response protocols.

"This is also an ongoing Police investigation, meaning there are limits to what can be said publicly while the investigation and related forensic work continue,” says the spokesperson.

“Where any information is confirmed that indicates risk to individuals, Health New Zealand will work with the impacted organisation and relevant agencies to ensure appropriate steps are taken to notify and support those affected."

ZenTech's website says the CRO provides clinical trial and analytical laboratory services for the international pharmaceutical industry.

A statement from the company reported in Stuff says it has taken certain systems offline while working to ensure their IT environment is secure and the incident has been contained.

“We are aware that some sample material purported to be company data has been published online. As a matter of priority, we have engaged independent cyber security experts to investigate the incident and assess the nature and extent of any impact,” it says.

New Zealand’s health system has been hit by a number of high profile breaches this year, including at patient portal provider Manage My Health, digital medication management platform MediMap and private healthcare provider IntraCare.

Altersec chief executive Faustin Roman said in March that having a cluster of breaches follows a predictable pattern which he described as a "feeding frenzy", where attackers target sectors with demonstrated weak defences and minimal consequences.
  

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Health New Zealand’s HealthX team is developing an AI Foundation Service to enable approved health use cases to use selected AI models safely within a governed environment. 

The work brings together HealthX, HX Digital, Digital Services, and clinical and assurance teams.

Sonny Taite, director of innovation and AI at Te Whatu Ora, told the co:lab 2026 conference on September 2 that HealthX has grown to become a core cross-functional team of around 20 people and a national Clinical Innovation Advisory Group involving clinicians from across the country.

The Foundation Service is in its initial build and validation phase, but Taite said it is intended to provide a safe, controlled way to apply appropriate AI models to genuine health-service problems.

The aim is to enable clinicians and other subject-matter experts across the country to work in small, cross-functional teams to develop solutions to real health-service problems. These teams would bring together clinical, engineering, data, and assurance expertise rather than expecting clinicians to develop or deploy unsupported tools themselves.

He told attendees that the intention is for the service to become a national capability, with AI-assisted software engineering among its first use cases.

HealthX has also developed a structured pipeline for problems and potential solutions submitted from across the sector. An early-stage AI-assisted tool is being developed to scan this material and identify potential connections for review by the team. 

Taite is testing the tool against the HealthX pipeline and said that as it develops, it will look for links among opportunities, existing problems, and emerging evidence.

He said those working in the sector are best placed to identify the challenges that need solving, and that clearly defining the problem is critical when making a submission.

HealthX operates on a clinically led model, meaning every initiative must have a clinical champion.

“For every initiative, we need clinical champions who agree that this is the right thing,” he said, adding that this means ensuring the initiative responds to a genuine problem, addresses a real need, and focuses on delivering meaningful value. 

Clinical leadership is supported by appropriate privacy, security, clinical safety, and workforce impact assessments.

Taite said the team is exploring how selected early research, clinical evaluation, and proof-of-concept activity could be better supported, helping promising ideas build the evidence needed to enter the HealthX delivery pipeline. Options being considered include a future dedicated funding pathway, subject to approval. 

The team has also formalised an international partnership, signing a memorandum of understanding with UCL Partners, a United Kingdom academic health science partnership. 

The relationship gives HealthX access to evidence and practical experience from across the NHS, helping the team test its thinking and identify lessons that could be applied in New Zealand.

Image: Sonny Taite, director of innovation and AI at Te Whatu Ora, speaking at co:lab 2026 

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The government has accepted all 16 recommendations from an independent review of mental health and addiction telehealth services, which found many calls are being abandoned because of long wait times and fragmentation between services is creating risk.  

The review, conducted between April and June 2026 by an independent expert panel, found that a large number of calls to the country's three national mental health and addiction telehealth providers go unanswered or are abandoned. 

The three providers are Whakarongorau Aotearoa, which operates the 1737 helpline; Youthline; and Lifeline Aotearoa. 

It also found that poor integration between providers is creating gaps in patient care as callers are being passed between services without resolution or, in many cases, without any follow-up support. 

"Safety concerns do not lie primarily within any individual provider, but at the interfaces between them and with the wider emergency and health system," the report says. 

An example is when calls are escalated to emergency services, telehealth providers have no way of knowing whether the caller actually connected with the support they were referred to. 

Mental health minister Matt Doocey announced three immediate responses: an expansion of peer support hours through 1737, a proactive follow-up call pilot for people in acute distress, and the establishment of a dedicated 24/7 national suicide prevention crisis line function. 

"Too many people are not getting through quickly enough, and we do not always have enough visibility of what happens after someone is referred or escalated to another service," Doocey said. 

Peer support availability through 1737 will be extended to 9am-12pm, seven days a week, with five additional full-time equivalent peer support workers. The expanded service is expected to add between 15,000 and 20,000 additional contacts per year. 

Health New Zealand will commission Whakarongorau to pilot proactive follow-up calls for up to 1,000 people experiencing acute distress following an initial telehealth interaction. 

The government also plans to set up a 24/7 suicide prevention crisis line within the telehealth system. 

Doocey said he has asked officials for advice on introducing a dedicated mental health and addiction telehealth target to drive improvements in wait times. 

The review found abandonment rates range from 29 percent to 33 percent on the 1737 line, 57 percent to 69 percent on Lifeline's main line, and 49 percent to 68 percent on Lifeline's Tautoko suicide crisis line. 

Average wait times on the 1737 line run between 21 and 26 minutes, with only around half of calls answered within 10 minutes, despite the key performance indicator target of 80 percent. 

"It takes a lot of courage to make that call, and the longer you are waiting, the more opportunities you have to lose that courage and just hang up," one lived experience participant told the review panel. 

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AI was a hot topic at Co:Lab this year with speakers highlighting patient concerns about its use in clinical care, the importance of selecting the right combination of tools and the need to upskill the workforce to take advantage of them.

 If we keep coming back to what matters to the patient, we will create a far better healthcare system than we currently have.”

National chief medical officer Helen Stokes-Lampard flagged growing patient anxiety around artificial intelligence in clinical care and spoke about genomics and precision medicine as significant opportunities for the health sector.

She described a case where a hospital patient tried to sign a consent form refusing any AI involvement in their care. 

She said task-specific AI is integrated into all levels of the health system and the patient's real concern was about sensitive health data being processed by large language model platforms such as ChatGPT.

Stokes-Lampard pointed to the ‘black box’ problem, where the reasoning behind AI outputs cannot be fully understood, as a key concern for regulators and health leaders globally.

She highlighted the opportunity of genomics and personalised medicine for New Zealand, saying the Māori and Pacific populations give the country a distinctive genomic profile. 

"We are uniquely placed to provide a massive contribution to that world genomic database of information," she said.

"This is not about AI being done to the organisation, it is about people in the organisation leaning into AI to help the tasks that they undertake."

Spark Health chief executive John Macaskill-Smith told attendees that the organisations making the most progress with AI are not buying off-the-shelf products, but training their own people to build and manage AI agents themselves. 

He said one of the Big Four firms has set a target of matching its 40,000 human consultants with an equivalent digital workforce, creating a one-to-one ratio of human to AI agents. 

"Rather than being threatened by the opportunity, why don't you reach out and have a go at it and start to explore what the opportunities might be?" he said.

For New Zealand's pathology sector Macaskill-Smith identified four workflow areas suited to agentic AI: pre-analytical errors that lead to incorrect test orders, patient uncertainty about where results are and what they mean, critical result follow-up, and the management of complex ‘send-away’ testing.

“5 years ago the microscope was my main tool… now I have ChatGPT Enterprise and openevidence.com open on the desk and use it all day, every day.”

David Roche anatomical pathologist at Awanui Labs gave examples of what AI can do in pathology labs right now:
- Detecting and grading tumours in prostate, breast, and colon cancer cases
- Identifying cancer spread into lymph nodes
- Flagging slide quality issues before they reach the pathologist

He told attendees that multimodal AI models are also beginning to combine imaging, genetics, clinical records, and patient data into integrated diagnostic outputs.

When it comes to challenges and risks, Roche said training data quality really matters, accountability frameworks need to be in place before AI makes a consequential error, deskilling is a genuine risk and the environmental cost of AI infrastructure is also significant.

"The order in which you use these tools, and how you actually implement this with people, is so incredibly important.”

Poor workflow design can neutralise even the most capable AI tools, but a well-structured combinations of models - including older, traditional ones -  consistently outperform single-model approaches, Colby Raley told co:lab 2026.

Raley is a strategist in Microsoft’s NZ public sector team and spoke about a diagnostic study using GPT-4 where clinicians given access to the tool achieved 74 percent diagnostic accuracy, while the AI working alone reached 92 percent.

Another pathology study of more than 100 slides showed a different risk: clinicians without confident diagnoses were unduly swayed by AI recommendations of negative results.

"That is the flip side, the risk of building in too much confidence," Raley said. 

"There is quite a lot of consideration around how you want to bring these tools in and how you need to upskill the people that are going to be using them."

She said organisations working with low-resource languages such as te reo Māori found that traditional, purpose-trained models outperformed generative AI tools, and mixed-language conversations required hybrid approaches combining both model types.

"It is not just about the model, it is how you put things together," said Raley.

The Co:Lab conference is for the pathology sector and was held in Wellington on September 2-3, 2026.

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A new digital platform lets patients see and compare GP video appointment providers, pricing and availability in one place as part of Health New Zealand’s Online GP service.

Martin Hefford, acting director community and primary care funding, says Online GP Care was developed to give people another way to access timely healthcare when they can't see their usual GP, need care after hours, are travelling, or can't get a prompt appointment. 

The 24/7 telehealth service was launched in July 2025 and since then has delivered around 115,000 consultations to nearly 86,000 people.

Patients previously had to navigate to each provider's individual website to compare options but the integration means they can now see all providers in one view.

The new platform is enabled by OctansCare, with Whakarongorau as the delivery partner.

Jean Fleming, programme director digital primary care design at Health NZ, says patients can filter appointments by clinician gender, language, pricing, and availability across all eight telehealth providers in a single view. She described the current phase as a shift from a passive listings experience to an active booking one.

Since the tool went live, all available appointments across providers have been booked out before 5 p.m. each day.

"It is amazing what removing that little bit of friction has done for people's ability to just go, 'I'll book it,' rather than, 'I'll navigate to it,'" Fleming says.

Four of the eight providers are fully integrated with the platform, meaning patients can complete their booking details entirely within the Health New Zealand site and then be directed to the provider to make payment. 

She says all eight Online GP telehealth providers will be fully integrated with the booking platform from October onwards. 

Digital delivery manager Courtney Brierly says engagement with the Online GP Care page on the Health NZ website had been climbing steadily in the two weeks before the platform went live, likely driven by school-based promotion of the under-14 fee changes. 

A subsidy update means online GP appointments are free for all children under 14, regardless of whether they hold a Community Services Card.

When the booking functionality launched that existing traffic translated directly into bookings, she says.

One of the next features in development is a "book on behalf" function, which would allow a person to book an appointment for a family member, or enable a health professional to book on behalf of a patient who is with them.

"We have purposefully phased the delivery for this," Brierly says. 

"We wanted to prove value early,  get out the door with something that does help New Zealanders assess which appointment suits their needs best, and then take into account consumer feedback, the uptake, and demonstrate value before we move forward into more functionality."

Hefford says the timing of launching the new platform is intentional.

"With winter pushing demand for care up across the board, this is a good time to remind people that they can get a GP video appointment from home, seven days a week, through this service," Hefford says.

A $3 million NZD investment is supporting pharmacies, rural health providers, and other community organisations to set up private consultation spaces equipped with the technology needed to connect people directly with an online GP.

As of 2 September 2026, 245 pharmacies and 56 rural and urgent care providers have signed up to create these spaces within their services.

Anna Campbell, chief support services officer at Whakarongorau Aotearoa / New Zealand Telehealth Services says Whakarongorau worked alongside Health NZ, participating online GP providers. and Valentia Technologies to support the initiative.

"As the delivery and coordination partner, we've helped create a more joined-up pathway that supports people to access the care that's right for their circumstances while strengthening connections across the wider health system," she says.

"We have used our expertise in service integration, consumer-centred design and large-scale service delivery of complex national health initiatives.

Malik Rizwan, executive lead Valentia Technologies, says digital healthcare works best when technology connects people, healthcare providers and established community services rather than operating as a standalone channel.

"This collaboration demonstrates how a flexible technology platform, effective service coordination and strong community partnerships can work together to make healthcare easier to access," he says.

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The Digital Health Week Conference NZ draft programme has been released, with a line-up reflecting the breadth of how AI, data and digital are enabling the health and disability system across Aotearoa.

New Zealand's largest gathering for the digital health sector regularly attracts more than 1,100 attendees from across the motu and this year is being held on November 18-19 at  the Due Drop Events Centre in Manukau, Auckland.

Now in its 24th year, the conference provides an independent space where the health and disability workforce, educators, innovators, government, and industry come together.

Master of ceremonies Rachel Smalley, journalist and founder of The Medicine Gap, will guide the two-day event featuring more than 150 presentations across four stages.

Among the headline speakers confirmed are award-winning leader, military veteran, and founder of #workschoolhours Ellen Joan Ford and Dave Letele, founder of the BBM Programme.

Both bring perspectives that go beyond the digital, grounding the conversation in people, community, and what health systems are actually for.

Letele's keynote will be followed by a panel discussion on addressing the social determinants of health, also featuring former prime minister Sir Bill English, and Dame Ranjna Patel, co-founder of Tāmaki Health. 

The role of artificial intelligence (AI) in health will feature, with a keynote from chief executive and founder of academyEX Frances Valentine followed by a presentation from Kevin Ross on navigating the AI horizon from the Centre for Digital Modernisation of Health. 

Other confirmed speakers and panellists include director general of health Audrey Sonerson, chair of the NZ Clinical Senate Jonathan Christiansen and Amandeep Hansra, chief clinical adviser (medicine) at the Australian Digital Health Agency.

A panel of Health New Zealand's national clinical leaders - chief medical officer Helen Stokes-Lampard, chief nurse Nadine Gray, and chief allied health scientific and technical Jacqui Lunday - will look at how digital tools can support coordinated care across hospital, community, and home settings.

Other panel discussions explore a range of hot topics facing the sector including the risks and rewards of AI, how to scale and export a digital health business, and navigating a career in digital health.

In 2026, HiNZ is co-leading the flagship two-day conference in partnership with the Digital Health Association (DHA) 

HiNZ chief executive Alex Kemp says the programme moves between the clinical, the cultural and the commercial while keeping people at the centre.

“Healthcare today is digital healthcare and every part of the health and disability system has a role to play in shaping its future,” she says.

DHA chief executive Stella Ward says the conference theme is about turning ideas into action. 
“Attendees can expect to walk away with practical knowledge about how they can take action in the digital space within their own working lives and organisations,” she says.

With the programme now confirmed and registrations open, be sure to secure your place early. 

Further details on the conference, including registration information, are available on the conference website.

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

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