The Waikato DHB IS team have just hosted 2 fantastic workshop days with attendees as diverse as consumers, clinicians, booking clerks, Māori health team members, community and primary care providers, corrections, city council and tertiary providers. It was simply amazing. We learnt so much in 12 hours my head hurts. It also made us wonder why we haven’t done anything like this before as an IS team and what other great projects we could do bringing alongside our colleagues. Who else asks all and sundry to join in on IS workshop days?
Sounds like there should be more of this happening. How would you propose ‘sharing the love’ to get it happening in other DHBs and in PHOs and including NGOs?
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That does sound amazing. A simple and effective way to connect IS to the people who use their kit, promote digital literacy amongst health professionals, and get a multidisciplinary vibe happening.
@Ruth_Large, do you mind if I make it a new topic? It is a little off the Telehealth thread. Done!
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Go for it and yes I agree it’s been eye opening for us and something we will do more of in the future
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I’m not sure we had a particular recipe @KarenDay . We have established an informal relationship with our consumer council and made sure to involve them in our workshops. We put out a few specific emails requesting nominations to make sure we had an established wide range of attendees and then did a short campaign on our intranet page. We used the workshop opportunity to give a brief overview of our plans then broke our groups up into 3 and moved them around stations discussing issues armed with sticky notes. One of our workshops was by video. It was really great to have a diverse range of staff and community members through. One of the best bit for me was having attendees bounce ideas off each other. I would totally do it again.
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Ruth this is a great topic. I cant speak for the rest of NZ but the “whole of system” approach to digital and data solutions is a hot topic here in Whanganui. And a space we have room to learn on how to do this well. Equally important here is the impact this has on an equity, and ensuring true partnership in exploring digital and data solutions with iwi in our hapu and rohe. Im very keen to have further discussions in this area.
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Totally. We are just about to support a Maori led hui on Telehealth prior to our next full workshop where we will agree on vision and large forward. Really exciting.
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I’m speaking with some colleagues in the UK who have experience with collaborative approaches between clinical and IS. I’m exploring how to establish a sustainable community here with relevant standards development organisations such as HL7 and standards communities such as IHE. I’ve also raised this idea with NZHIT who seem keen by the idea. Really keen to help support this concept. Happy to chat more about my ideas and how we can work together to explore how it could work.
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Well, we are at the intersection of both right here as CiLN.
In one direction we have all clinicians, of which CiLN is a small subset. This connection between clinical informaticians and other clinicians is a key purpose of Health Forum NZ, but one that is yet to be any where near fully realised. It needs widespread support and contributions from a whole bunch of people and organisational endorsement to achieve this.
In the other direction we have all health IS professionals, of which CiLN is also a subset. HiNZ represents this group quite well, and we have several silo’d online communities across the sector. However, I have not yet encountered a lot of enthusiasm to pulling us all together as a single online community.
If people want this all joined up, from all clinicians through to all health IS professionals, we can achieve it. But it needs to be a groundswell / grassroots movement. I’d be delighted to facilitate it, but don’t have a chance alone.
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I’m more thinking a community focussed on interoperability problems, more specifically. We could accelerate progress by learning and adopting/adapting ideas from overseas.
There are many groups that focus on this problem through events like connectathons, hackathons and the like. I have connections at NHS Hack Day, INTEROPen, IHE who are willing to help us leverage their experiences to help inform how we could run similar things here. I think it would be wise to learn from international experiences than try to create something new from scratch.
It could be facilitated by a CiLN sub-group with interoperability and implementation experience. It’s purpose would be to support and connect relevant networks and experts to adopt/adapt/develop/maintain NZ implementation guides in collaboration with the (to be established) Health NZ digital delivery function. The group would need to have close partnerships with NZHIT from an industry perspective, DHBs/primary care for sector engagement and alignment, HISO/HL7/IHE from an standards perspective as well as clinical and consumer leaders to ensure clear problem definition with a regional/national lens. It could align with nHIP priorities and may be able to secure funding from MoH. To be sustainable, it would need to be funded and to be able to be part of the group who influence the standards themselves, there would need to be some form of funding agreement.
For example, an immunisation standard that needs to be designed and consistently implemented could be led by a sub-group who coordinate an Immunisation standard development and implementation group. Key activities could include problem and scope definition/service design with clinicians and consumers, solution design/design sprint, develop an implementation guide through connectathons with which could be hosted by on test platforms funded by industry partners. The IG could be trialed at a pilot site, refined and then adopted regionally/nationally.
There’s a lot of research we would need to do before committing to anything butI’m keen to hear other people’s thoughts on this concept.
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This sounds a lot like the work that HISO does. Perhaps you should include the HISO people in this discussion?
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Agreed Karen, HISO would definitely need to support the effort of a group like this if it existed.
As I understand, HISO publishes and maintains standards but doesn’t currently support the development or maintenance of Implementation Guides. Eg NZ FHIR profiles. (I may be wrong because I’m not actively involved at present)
In the future, IGs would likely be developed, supported and maintained by Health NZ, once established. Relevant SDOs would also likely have some form of ownership. possibly also regional bodies if there are regional IG differences (this would be strongly discouraged as that defeats the purpose of an IG, particularly for FHIR profiles)
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