The health tech project that stands to cut ED times and save millions

Opinion: Brad Porter for The Post

Brad Porter is chief executive of Orion Health, a health technology company.

OPINION: As I’m writing this on a weekday evening, wait times at the Middlemore and Waitakere hospital emergency departments (EDs) are around seven hours for both places.

Then a colleague told me today he had a 21 day wait for his GP’s next available appointment, and, between these two points alone, the picture of a health system under strain comes clearly into view.

Sure, it seems in vogue to beat up our healthcare system. Much of our dialogue here in New Zealand is focused on how on earth we can do more of the same with less money. But that’s asking the wrong question.

Elsewhere in the world, we’ve seen ED admissions drop by more than a third thanks to providers asking different questions.

Alberta in Canada did just that. The same solution also supported a 41% reduction in ED visits for asthma and a 31% reduction in patient bed days.

Sounds useful, right? After all, reductions like these alleviate workforce pressures and associated costs. It allows us to do more with less money.

New Zealand’s healthcare system still has a foot in the analogue era. We are stuck in a digital error.

Why isn’t the call to drag our healthcare system into the future louder?

Through my work I get to meet with health system leaders around the world to improve their service. There is an increasingly common understanding of the innate value in data-driven care, and more people are driving it forward.

Back home, though, these conversations are much harder to get off the ground. Health NZ’s chief of digital and data role was dis-established. And when I see how far other providers around the world are advancing, I want to see it happen here in New Zealand, so we can have better care available for our families and our communities.

Don’t get me wrong, we’re not in last place here. But plenty of other places around the world have found themselves in a similar position and are now planning to do something transformative, yet pragmatic, about it.

We can too. And the time is now.

It’s hard to dress up the beauty of data. But if you can ensure the right information is in the hands of the right people at the right time, you can save a lot of time and you can save lives. Data saves lives.

The solution underpinning Alberta Canada’s reduction in ED admissions is called a shared care record.

If that sounds rather dull, that’s because it is. Much like we needed to lay the cabling enabling fibre-speed internet in New Zealand, we need to invest in some basic healthcare infrastructure that enables health data to flow between providers around the country.

Sure, there are a range of ageing hospital systems being used across different regions and providers today. But these are mostly disjointed, holding patient information that only tells them part of the story. We don’t need to rip and replace all these systems straight away – but we need to start by connecting the good bits of what is there.

With a national shared care record in place, wherever you turn up for care in the country, the healthcare professional should be able to easily source a reliable and current record of you as a patient. It should mean they don’t have to “start from the top” and ask you to repeat details you might feel you’ve already shared 100 times before.

In Hampshire, England, for example, where their shared care record has been in place since 2021, clinicians now save 22 minutes in admin time every day since implementing this system. That saved time translates to £6 million in cost savings annually.

If you were to apply that same potential to New Zealand’s 90,000 clinicians, we could be saving upwards of NZ$125m per year.

The potential for better healthcare underpinned by access to meaningful data and information is exponential. And we don’t need to lay physical pipes to make it happen.

If New Zealand invests in modern digital infrastructure for healthcare with a national shared care record and digital front door services supported by a unified call centre ,we stand a chance of making significant productivity gains and reducing costs.

It gives us the potential to save upwards of $125 million per year by saving clinicians 22 minutes of admin each per day. We could also cut ED visits by one third, alleviating pressure so that when people need urgent care, they don’t need to wait seven hours.

Orion Health is part of the Aotearoa Connected Care Alliance (ACCA), a consortium of NZ health tech providers proposing to implement a national shared care record solution.