NHITB sessions from HINZ conference 2011

The Health Informatics New Zealand (HINZ) conference, held in Auckland from 23 to 25 November 2011, lived up to its reputation as the annual highlight of the health IT calendar. The National Health IT Board's presentations reflected the conference theme of Working together, working smarter. Many presentations reflected on lessons learnt from the challenges of implementing an e-health vision.

A summary of the most relevant sessions follows. You can find out more about these presentations or see all available HINZ presentations, photos and videos at www.hinz.org.nz. 

Sector Architects Workshop: Exploring the Interoperability Reference Architecture:

The Sector Architects Group's interoperability reference architecture was presented by our very own Alastair Kenworthy, and David Hay (HL7 New Zealand) to an audience of about 50 technical people. The presentation included an update on the reference architecture's progress towards ratification as a sector standard as it goes through the HISO process. The reference architecture's main purpose is to describe the standards for interface regional clinical data repositories -- the information sharing hubs of the IT Plan.

International speaker Chris Lindop, from Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE), followed with a presentation on how to implement the IHE Cross Enterprise Document Sharing (XDS) integration profile, which is the key requirement of the reference architecture.

View the Introduction to the Interoperability Reference Architecture presentation here

eHealth Strategy Panel, Supporting Integrated Care Presentation:

Graeme Osborne, Peter Gow, Ernie Newman and Barry Vryenhoek set the scene for the conference with this session. They acknowledged the great progress made over the last year, and outlined some of the activities and challenges for 2012. See link for presentations. View presentation here

View the Government eHealth Strategy – Supporting Integrated Care presentation here 

Clinicians' Challenge judging:

The presentations by the three clinicians who were shortlisted out of fifty-six entries in the Clinicians Challenge, and the winning vendors, attracted huge interest. The cases were so compelling it took the judges over an hour to decide on the winners.    

The winning clinician was Dr Janet Liang, a Waitemata DHB intensive care specialist who proposed a language interpreter system.

The runners up were:

• Dr Nicholas Jones, a Public Health Physician at Hawke's Bay District Health Board who proposed eNotification of legally reportable conditions to Medical Officers of Health
• Dr Alex Psirides, a Capital and Coast DHB Intensive Care Specialist, who proposed an electronic early warning scoring system to alert staff to patients who are deteriorating.

Corrine Gower submitted the winning vendor proposal, working with Healthlink, Kinross Group and Maxsys. They came up with a solution to eNotify legally reportable conditions to Medical Officers of Health.

The Clinicians' Challenge prizes included a range of professional development opportunities. The clinicians and vendors will work together to explore possibilities for furthering the winning proposals. The results will be reported back to a HINZ Seminar in 2012.

The Health Sector Leaders State of the Nation Panel:

Traditionally, this panel has featured Chief Information Officers focusing on their local DHBs. This year, we took a different approach and featured regional leaders, (Johan Vendrig and  Darrin Hackett), a clinical perspective (Martin Wilson), a primary care perspective (Andrew Terris from Patients' First) and Tony Cooke with the national perspective.

The speakers presented on the significant work they are doing in their respective environments towards delivering the NHITP as they move from planning to execution.

Regionalisation presents challenges such as getting the governance right, prioritising investment spend and building capability, but delivers benefits such as the ability to move faster and be more flexible. It allows "co-opetition" (a healthy mix of co-operation and competition) between regions and provides a better platform to ensure the use of standards.

A key theme was the need for solutions that support a patient-centred approach to clinical decision making to deliver safe, high quality healthcare in an efficient way - regardless of where the point of care is. The respectful use of people's health information is an underpinning principle. Clinical leadership is critical to the success of regional and national implementation as we move from exchanging information to sharing Information. See link for presentations.

View the State of the Nation: Health Sector Leaders Panel presentation here