A note from New Zealand’s National Allied Health Informatics Group

It’s incredibly exciting to be part of the clinical informatics terrain at this time. Not only do we have the opportunity to be co-designing some really smart systems but also the emerging access to a wealth of integrated data that has the potential to effect significant change in our clinical systems. I am looking forward to the time I can have a dashboard present me with predictive staffing capacity according to service, patient need or care pathway.

However it can often be disappointing that these changes and outcomes take a while to take effect and that people, resources and money are constrained. Here in New Zealand we are doing our best to create networks that promote the sharing of these resources, time and effort. We are sharing work and ideas between district health boards (trusts), supporting our peers in their development, connections and knowledge. In order to broaden our collaboration and its potential we have recently created our own Clinical Informatics Leadership Network; looking to the UK for learnings of collaboration platforms.

We have already seen the benefit of multi-disciplinary collaboration through the publication of the National Allied Health Data Set Standard by the National Allied Health Informatics Network. This will be a founding cornerstone of our AHPs digital health strategy, as we use this establish a consistent platform of information for answering our clinical and strategic questions. It has also inspired a number of AHP leaders to look to the design of their systems and the integration of data collection as part of the clinician’s workflow – ‘passive data collection’.

This passive data collection methodology is not new, neither is it rocket science, however for our AHP community it will be a revolution. To move away from the manual collection of data to one of integrated passive collection, aims to release clinical time, increase the richness of data points and widen the pool of available data, once it’s merged with a wider database of system information. We may just be able to answer any question we have.

Rebecca George, Chair – National Allied Health Informatics Group