The troubled history and complex landscape of information management and technology in the New Zealand health sector

In 2001, the New Zealand government launched an ambitious health care information management and technology strategy that sought to integrate the health sector and facilitate the adoption throughout the New Zealand health sector of electronic health records that enhance information portability and give patients greater access to their own information. This article looks at the prospects for that strategy, against a background of extensive public health system restructuring in the 1990s. It notes that, through this period, health purchasers and providers developed information systems in isolation from one another and with minimal central oversight. The result is a highly complex and firmly established architecture and an array of problems that need rectifying. These, together with the current decentralisation of health structures mean that government's capacity to influence health sector activities is limited. The article concludes by reviewing current developments noting that progress by government towards it goals in this area is likely to be incremental, across a range of areas, sometimes driven by providers and sometimes by central agencies.