NEWS – eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth
The Health Data Platform (HDP) is giving Health NZ access to near real-time data to support insights such as forecasting radiology capacity and demand, tracking high-cost drug usage, and identifying patients at high risk of developing chronic disease.
Other initiatives in the pipeline include; supporting opportunistic vaccination in hospitals; visibility of waiting times for a broad range of diagnostics; and identification of patients with delayed discharge.
HDP is built on Snowflake technology, hosted on Amazon Web Services and integrates various datasets to support clinical decision-making and operational reporting.
A ‘Dragon’s Den’ process is used to select which data sets will be added to the platform.
Director of Health Analytics Delwyn Armstrong says, “it is not just a place that the data sits – it is a suite of tools for data acquisition, transformation, storage, analysis and sharing.
She describes it as a “centre of gravity where we can connect data to understand patient pathways”.
In the case of diagnostics, they previously did not know how many people were waiting because information was three months old and aggregated by district.
“Now we get that information daily – we can see how many are waiting, whether they are waiting in rural or urban areas, their ethnic group, age, and whether they are on other waitlists,” says Armstrong.
Director of data and analytics Stuart Bloomfield says new data sets are selected through a ‘Dragons’ Den’ process, where clinicians present proposals to a panel of clinical and operational leaders.
Those that progress must align with Health NZ and ministerial priorities, potential to improve patient outcomes and reduce harm, and strength of clinical leadership.
“When we look back at data sets that we have implemented where we have had strong clinical leadership, we have had the best outcomes,” he tells eHealthNews.
The HDP roadmap includes a broad range of diagnostics including laboratory data, primary health datasets enabling reporting of the new primary care health target, supporting the 24/7 telehealth initiative, as well as starting to share some data externally, such as directly to ACC.
Bloomfield, says the HDP is also being developed to support regional operational reporting and modernising national health collections to reduce the manual work needed, as some of these sit on technology introduced at the beginning of the century.
He says that timely data access is crucial for meeting health targets and operational management.
“You cannot run a health service on old information: the demand for having that information available as soon as possible is growing incredibly quickly,” says Bloomfield.
“This modern toolset gives us a platform for taking advantage of emerging technology such as AI. Our data holds so much potential for providing more equitable, accessible care to New Zealanders.”
The Health Data Platform (HDP and previously known as National Data Platform) is designed to unify fragmented health data to improve quality and safety of care, reduce delays, and support national health priorities.
It provides access across Health NZ and beyond with appropriate safeguards in place to respect and protect the sensitive data it hosts.