Dr Luke Bradford: College of GPs Medical Director on the Government launching a Health Digital Investment Plan

There's belief from experts that efforts to launch a single electronic medical record are 'well overdue'.

The Government is embarking on a 10-year Health Digital Investment Plan to improve Health New Zealand's digital infrastructure. 

The single record would replace 6,000 different systems currently in use.

College of GPs Medical Director Luke Bradford says it's needed. 

"We've been doing fragmented, piecemeal, bespoke solutions that don't get delivered for years, so this is something that we can at least build towards."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now the government is embarking on a plan to fix
the sorry state of it in our health system. The
Health Digital Investment Plan is going to take ten years
and it aims to modernize and unify the digital systems
used in our health sector. Doctor Luke Bradford is the
President of the Royal College of GPS and with us Now,
Hi Luke, Hi, how you doing well? This is overdue though,
isn't it.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. We've been doing fragmented, piecemeal, bespoke
solutions that don't get delivered for years, so this is
something that we can at least build towards.

Speaker 3 (00:28):
Okay, so what's the end goal?

Speaker 1 (00:30):
Is it that you or any other doctor, any other
health any hospital whatever in the whole country can click
on my name and see all the stuff about my
medical history.

Speaker 2 (00:41):
I mean, there's some stuff on confidentiality there, but I'll
give you a real life example. I'm currently palliating. I'm
looking after forty four year old mother of three who's dying.
A year and a half ago. I wrote a letter,
because that's what we still do. We write letters to
the hospital. A hospital wrote her a letter, gave her
an appointment, but she couldn't get to because she has
to get a boat in order to get to the hospital,
so they sent her another one. She showed up, got

(01:03):
the boat, got there and someone was off sick and
so she had to go home. The cardiologist, cardiologist and
a renal doctor didn't talk to each other, didn't talk
to me, didn't talk to the patient. It's all ended
up with her in a heap and she's now going
to die of heart failure. At no point was there
a point where she could have picked her own appointment,
where she could have entered her own observations, where as
sugars were where we could have worked quickly to change

(01:26):
our medicines around us in real life, rather than waiting
months for letters to bounce back and forth. So that's
why it's needed.

Speaker 1 (01:32):
So at the moment, some GP practices have got their
own systems right, is the goal basically to put it
all together.

Speaker 3 (01:38):
So we're all using one system. Is that the goal?

Speaker 2 (01:41):
No, I think it's going to be a click in
so that it works alongside the systems in because it's
not just GPS, GP's aged residential care, pharmacy, hospitals, all
of these providers, and so I think the idea is
that something sits that you can leap click into and
the patient will we have to access to Yeah, brilliant.

Speaker 3 (01:59):
Hey, look, thank you very much. His hoping it goes well.

Speaker 1 (02:01):
That's doctor Luke Bradford, Royal New Zealand College of GP's president.

Speaker 3 (02:05):
Right, Heather, I will buy Chris Bishop a box of
beers if he ditches the Regional councils. Looks like you're
going to owe him that.

Speaker 1 (02:12):
Hither Wayne Brown, someone needs to buy the man a beer.
Let's talk about Wayne Brown next.

Speaker 2 (02:19):
For more from Heather Duplessy, Allen Drive, listen live to
news Talks. It'd be from four pm weekdays, or follow
the podcast on iHeartRadio