IN ITS RESPONSE TO COVID- 19, NEW ZEALAND HAS BECOME A WORLD LEADER IN OPERATING A FULLY DIGITAL, INTEGRATED NATIONAL BORDER SYSTEM. CONNECT EDITOR REBECCA MCBETH REPORTS.
A s the early days of the Ardern announced that from midnight 9 April 2020, everyone entering New Zealand would have to go through 14 days of managed isolation in a dedicated facility. Since then, 32 hotels nationwide have been transformed into Managed Isolation and Quarantine Facilities (MIQF). The system has capacity for 4,500 Covid-19 pandemic were sweeping across the globe, Prime Minister Jacinda returnees to be moving through these new facilities at any one time and more than 130,000 people have completed an isolation stay. Each of these individuals requires regular health checks and testing for Covid-19 before they can be released and a centralised data set is published daily by the Ministry of Health. A border net Getting this system up and running has been a massive task, which comes under the Covid-19 All-of-Government (AoG) Response Group. It requires integrated modern data and digital systems to underpin the end-to-end process and putting these in place has been the focus of the Ministry of Health’s data and digital team. Successful roll-outs of national software solutions in something as complex as a health system are known around the world to be particularly difficult to execute. However, a unifying goal, government funding and a sense of urgency has allowed the Ministry, its
AoG partners such as the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment, health professionals and software vendors, to work together in a new way and achieve in mere months what previously would have taken many years, if ever achieved at all. The ecosystem is called BorderNET,
(Border System for Notifiable Exposure and Travel Related
Infectious Diseases) which records and links people’s arrival into the country through to their managed isolation stay, Covid-19 testing requests and results and national reporting. Key to this are the National Border Solution (NBS), which is an extension of another newly developed system called the National Contact Tracing Solution; and the Border Clinical Management System (BCMS). There is also a national clinical data repository for all Covid-19 test reports and a national register to record and track border worker testing status. Most recently, the Ministry has rolled out a Covid-19 Immunisation Register to record vaccinations against the virus. A unique identifier As a plane wings its way to New Zealand, the first of these new systems kicks in with the NBS pulling information from the Advanced Passenger Processing (APP) system. The solution is looking to get a reliable match for each of the passenger’s National Health Index number: a unique identifier which holds peoples’ name and address, date of birth, gender and ethnicity. While little known outside health circles, this number has been in use since 1993 and is the envy of many
Dr Lara Hopley specialist anaesthetist
clinical advisor digital innovations Waitematā District Health Board
Michael Dreyer GM national digital services Ministry of Health New Zealand
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