NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth
This is a companion discussion topic for the original eHealth News article:
This is a companion discussion topic for the original eHealth News article:
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What a fascinating read 
We need multiple EHRs in our ecosystem AND we need sharing of information for interoperability.
Just like competing pharmaceutical companies, it would be nice if arbitration can be done independent of for-profit companies. PHARMAC has served us well, in my opinion, in regards to fair access to medicines. Yes, it would be nice if the PHARMAC budget were bigger and there were more options for new and expensive biological and oncology treatments, but overall, I think the process of PHARMAC is transparent and considerate.
Will Hira be able to play a similar role when considering the issues raised in this legal dispute? With an API meeting Hira standards, would this situation have been avoided?
How will the pending “‘principals’ of Transitions of Care & Results Management” mentioned by @Anna be helpful: Addressing Correspondence Challenges in Healthcare?
Patients have multiple providers, across settings . . . especially those with lots of complex chronic conditions. We must have multiple EHRs and health IT products to ensure continual innovation. So, this use-case highlights the challenges of interoperability . . . hopefully we have some equity-focused solutions here in Aotearoa
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If I’m reading the article correctly, an EMR provider claiming that a rival enabling data sharing is
extracting more patient information than it is entitled to
implies that patient data is proprietary not to the patient but to the EMR provider. This is extremely worrying.
As informaticians we probably need to advocate for the position/postulate that the patient is the ultimate owner of their health data and work from there. Patients don’t give consent for MedTech to use their data, they give consent to their care provider.
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This is SUCH a valid point. What would be the most effective way to rally behind this and influence ‘the system’? Can policy influence this? If so, how, and how can we influence that policy?
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Is this a touchpoint that CiLN / @ciln-advisory should be advocating for?
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Having naively ventured into this group of issues previously, it is not as straightforward as it seems at the social platitude level. Below the surface, these are murky waters, littered with divergent implicit assumptions about the nature of the swamp, with the occasional epistemological beast lurking in the dark.
We would need to get a consensus from the wider membership on our position and who we feel should listen to it. We may need to consider how we would manage a potential divergence of views on the issue.
It is an important issue, and it is the sort of issue that we could take up. We just need to take it up intentionally and invest the appropriate resources required if we do.
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ok, I like this and seems something concrete to create a ‘position statement’ on, or something. @robinblythe , thank you for highlighting this aspect and I note you are a health economist and PhD Student and were at HiNZ . . . do you have an ongoing relationship here in Aotearoa, NZ? Our Clinical Informatics group is focused on us clinically-trained folk with an interest in IT, but clearly, the informatics space is broader.
This could also be a topic where the clinical-folk work out our stance, then take to the wider informatics expertise and even try to get a truly multi-disciplinary momentum behind whatever aspect we can target??
Finally, @Greig , from the morass you have previously traversed in, around this topic, would you be able to summarize some key bullet points of the issues at stake? I’m wondering if we have a list, and could run a poll, to start collating divergence and convergence of views that might inform a position we can all gather around??
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Thanks @emily.gill . I think this is probably an issue that will eventually get legislation in one form or another, so it would be great to have a relatively widely-accepted position statement from the informatics community to help guide that - recognising that patients and other interest groups will have their own perspectives.
I live in Wellington so I guess that would count as an ongoing relationship! I’m not a clinician but as you say, clinical informatics is a broad church. My thesis topic focuses on prediction and decision support systems for acute clinical deterioration.
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