Clinicians are leading a range of successful health IT projects at Waitemata District Health board as part of its LeapFrog programme and i3 Institute for Innovation and Improvement.
Waitemata DHB's journey of transforming its approach to health IT projects began in 2014, when CEO Dr Dale Bramley and clinical director of innovation, Robyn Whittaker, travelled to the United States as part of a Commonwealth Fund initiative.
They had the opportunity to visit some of the country’s top performing institutions and see how they were successfully incorporating digital technologies into their health services.
Whittaker says that many of the implementations had made clinicians’ lives easier and created good outcomes for patients, both in terms of their health and their experience of the health system.
Whittaker and Bramley returned full of enthusiasm and started work on what was appropriate and feasible in a Kiwi context.
"We started to think about how we could have a programme that would fast track some of these things and that would have a really good impact for patients and staff. We wanted to learn from what others had done," says Whittaker.
"Clinicians leading it was always a really big part of it – the projects had to be clinically led and based on what clinicians thought would be really good and helpful,"Whittaker explains.
Source: Ministry of Health - Digital News