Commercial members on the eHealth Forum

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There is an interesting conversation on the Discourse support forum about how best to handle vendor members:

While the conversation there is still developing, you can already see that others also grapple with the same issues that we do here in Aotearoa’s digital health sector.

Our specific issues:

  1. many skilled, experienced, and generous NZ health informaticians work for vendors - some permanently, and others just from time to time.

  2. these good people have to reconcile their community altruism with (often brutal) commercial pressures

  3. one of the great appeals of the eHealth Forum is some breathing space from the incessant marketing of the outside world (I’m looking at you, LinkedIn), and breaches of this are not well tolerated.

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As someone who is very open about having a foot in both camps I think the 2 key things are transparency and a specific code of conduct for those with vendor relationships.

Having transparency as a core expectation and a code of conduct as a framework for involvement on the forum should provide enough guard rails to manage potential issues.

My feeling (with both hats on :wink:) is that we are too small of a country to have any sorts of silos of discussions around problems to solve and potential solutions - that will just perpetuate the legacy of the DHB model of health IT which most would agree has led to fragmentation that will take years to unwind.

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