HiNZ Special Report - Healthcare Analytics in Aotearoa NZ

CASE STUDY Te Whatu Ora - New Zealand Health Partnerships

Moving from data analytics to insights

TeWhatu Ora - New Zealand Health Partnerships delivers the Health Finance, Procurement and Information Management System (FPIM). FPIM supports the New Zealand health system’s day-to-day finance, procurement and supply chain operations, managing how goods and services are sourced, ordered, delivered, stored, used and paid for. As part of this work, the organisation has developed a Health System Catalogue. This delivers a single national procurement catalogue, national data standards, a central data repository of actual spend on medical devices, known as the Spend Data Repository

Procurement teams within districts have access to the data relevant to their districts to view what is happening locally and whether staff are buying catalogued items off national contracts. If not, they can have the conversation about ‘why not’? Jakkie van Wyk, Head, FPIM Implementation and Data, says the organisation created a four- year business plan for 2021-2024, which focused on moving from data to analytics to insights. “We thought it would take us four years to get there, but we have been able to move much faster than expected and are already doing a lot of work on insights,” she says. Agile and flexible financial forecasting The SDR was originally created to collate spend reporting for District Health Boards (DHBs). In July 2022, the DHBs were disestablished and the new national organisation,TeWhatu Ora – Health New Zealand, was created. vanWyk says NZ Health Partnerships’ ability to access spend data at a national level meant it was asked to produce regular national reports. The organisation developed the Financial Forecasting and Reporting solution for Te Whatu Ora consolidating the budgets of all former DHBs.

When Te Whatu Ora Health New Zealand was created in July 2022, NZ Health Partnerships was tasked with taking a national view of health spend data. This information was held in nine differen Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems used across the country’s 20 hospital districts. At the time, half of these districts used the national FPIM solution, while the rest used a range of ERPs to manage their day-to-day operations.

Erik Salzmann, Te Whatu Ora - NZ Health Partnerships Solutions Architect, explains that the organisation needed to pull that data together to provide a national view.

(SDR), and a framework for procurement compliance.

It went live in 2021 with an analytics tool and a data platform and rapidly stood up the data pipelines to all ERP systems. The challenge then becomes harmonising and standardising the data. “The hard part is pulling all of that together and making sense out of it, and that is where we are using visualisation tools to assist us,” Salzmann says. The analytics tool is used to do data validation and verification, as well as the visualisation, analytics and forecasting for the Spend Data Repository.

HEALTHCARE ANALYTICS IN AOTEAROA NEW ZEALAND | A HINZ SPECIAL REPORT | 15

Powered by