Outdated health data system needs $2.3b

The Ministry of Health wants to change the way people’s medical records are shared nationwide, with IT health experts growing frustrated in the meantime.

The ministry has put a business case to Cabinet for millions of dollars to set up New Zealand’s first national health information platform. The country’s hospital IT systems are so outdated, fragmented and insecure they need $2.3 billion spent on them over the next decade, according to official assessments.

Colin Mckenzie – who helps run Epsom health diagnosticshandling firm Sy sm ex, which gets people’s lab test results through to whichever clinicians need to see them – grapples with it daily. ‘‘If I am from Hamilton and I get transferred to Auckland for specialist care, they can’t see any of my information,’’ he said.

‘‘They will ring up the other hospital or the region and ask: fax through Colin’s records or attach them to an email.’’ People were still surprised when he told them how fractured the health data system remained.

‘‘We have great little silos of data that act regionally but they are not shared nationally,’’ Mckenzie said. ‘‘We have made slight progress from a regional perspective but no way have we made significant progress from any national perspective.’’

It was not just clinicians being kept in the dark but patients wanting to access their own data.

Health Ministry deputy director-general of data and digital Shayne Hunter has been pulling together a business case for a data-sharing platform he hopes will be a game changer.

It has gone to a Cabinet committee ahead of next month’s Budget. ‘‘We do have some outdated and fragmented systems,’’ Hunter said. ‘‘The way to join a map will be through the national health information platform.

‘‘It is a total priority for the ministry.’’ The proposed datasharing platform will cost several million dollars and take five years to build.

Industry insiders say if the Government does not approve this in the Budget 2021, frustrated IT companies might do it themselves. Malcolm Pollock has led health IT innovation for three decades, and was director of the National Institute for Health Innovation at Auckland University. He has released a new health IT report at Parliament, saying New Zealand had been on a backward slide since the early 1990s and had missed previous chances to reverse it. – RNZ