Health NZ reveals discarded digital projects, says it is not related to team data violation

Health New Zealand has stopped or has postponed a series of digital projects.
Photo: 123rf

A patient information system praised by Health New Zealand and a child health platform are among a series of digital projects that the agency has stopped or postponed.

A $ 11 million infections tracking solution has been suspended and some cyber security projects are also among the 136 initiatives in advance.

But another 732 projects worth US $ 200 million were completed or ongoing to 2024-25, according to a list released under the official information law (Oia) by Health nz Te for whatu ora.

The agency told RNZ that the routine review of its projects did not introduce new clinical risks.

“Invested more than ever” in cyber security last year, he added.

HNZ revealed last week that someone broke into systems and stole personal information about the Wellington region. An ex -employee of IT then made a direct connection between deferred projects and cyber violations.

HNZ rejected this.

“There is no correlation between any continuous or deferred project and the violation of privacy,” Darren Douglass interim director of information technology told RNZ in a statement.

On Monday, the agency interrupted its restructuring processes in three areas, although not mass layoffs that proposed in data and digital.

Minister Simeon Brown said he asked the front line services to be protected and said that “absolutely” considered the cyber security team as a front line.

“There is no proposed change in the structure or size of our cyber security team,” said Douglass.

Last May, Douglass had told the health minister’s office that HNZ depended on many old IT systems, which carried “serious risks to the organization,” which included interruptions, as well as safety vulnerabilities and “associated violations.”

Last December, he told a health conference in health: “The most pressing question for us is the reduction of financing for digital initiatives.

“This requires a significant change in the way we approach our work.”

Northland’s IT team had told managers at the end of last year that the team’s proposed cuts can lead to “more frequent and important cyber events, interruptions throughout the system. Privacy breach, loss of fidelity of digital systems and clinical records.”

Douglass told RNZ on Friday: “IT systems will continue to operate with critical systems and patient safety and privacy a priority.”

What was stopped or postponed?

Health NZ said the 136 projects stopped or deferred have nothing to do with the proposed team cuts; This was just a “standard annual process”.

Their scale was revealed at the end of 2024, at the time when data and HNZ’s digital unit were instructed to find another $ 100 million in economics, plus $ 380 million already cut by the government, raising Hira It’s main update program.

The new list of Oia sketches details of the 136 projects that were not public before (71 were postponed and 65 stopped – although about 30 were restarted and completed).

This shows that a “recovery committee” created by Brown wanted a $ 2 million cyber risk mitigation project early and reduced in scope. This is what happened.

A project of $ 130,000 to define national security standards, networks and the cloud was postponed.

Health Minister Simeon Brown speaking at the Business Health Forum in March 2025.
Photo: Calvin Samuel / RNZ

Although there were few cyber security projects on the list, she presented many projects designed to obtain patients from patients for doctors faster, such as:

• A $ 3.5 million child health platform has been placed in a “pipeline” to wait until more financing is available. He received a partial release six years ago in Auckland, with a promise “for the first time, we can identify which children are losing services.”
• The plug was pulled on a $ 1.1 million project called “Next Essential Step” in patient data management and digitally dependence.
• A system that “saves hundreds of hospital bed nights in monthly” in half a dozen hospitals since 2017, called Cortex, would be tested in Palmerston North before deployment – but this was postponed to consider whether it’s worth it.

“It is important to note that ‘Stop/Adive’ decisions do not introduce new clinical risks,” Douglass said.

However, Oia clearly shows that many of the projects are designed to reduce the existing risks of fragmented systems and improve clinical information flows, such as a $ 5 million initiative to improve clinical workflows and the postponement.

About two dozens of projects worth more than $ 40 million were placed on the “pipeline”, including US $ 15 million updates in the laboratory IT system and four life cycle maintenance lots “that support the safe and effective operation of healthcare sites.”

An anesthesia information management system of $ 5 million and a $ 15 million project to replace devices that will not be executed on Windows 11, an operating system that debuted by 2021, were postponed.

As it was a “leading world initiative” to put patients “totally in control” of their health data – because “in our current state, health consumers have little control over who can access their data.”

Globally, the “cloud” was promoted by Google, Amazon and others as a goddess for health information systems. However, health nation of US $ 3.6 million from Health NZ to connect websites across the country had not started and has now been postponed, even if it is an essential part of the National Data Platform (NDP) that HNZ promised “health data management throughout the country.”

Financial IT systems do not appear on the list. A recent independent revision of the financial hole that HNZ entered this agency relying a lot on a single Excel file to manage $ 28 billion, although it was easy to manipulate, lost errors and it was difficult to track.

Douglass said HNZ was still working on a 10 -year plan that would press for increased digital investment.

Five years ago, a government stock took health that needed $ 2.4 billion to correct properly.

Previously, 100 pages of feedback from the team leaked to RNZ about the data and the proposal for digital restructuring suggested that it was only IT workers who kept masses of old and not reliable systems ongoing.

“Internally, IT -related damage to HNZ’s care environments are common knowledge, but numerous false public narratives exaggerating the safety of HNZ IT systems are easily identifiable,” said one.

“For years, HNZ alleged data and digital investment was necessary to reduce this risk and damage, which was also a completion of the 2020 HDs [health and disability] System review. HNZ now suggests that the organization can “do more with less”.

The 2020 review said: “The system needs to work differently to accelerate digital transformation toward safer and more productive care … Most patient information is in inconsistent and machine readable formats.”

Health NZ started another project, the shared initiative of Digital Health Records (SDHR) to try to link the patient’s information maintained by GPS across the country to use much more telesaute. It has a relatively thin budget of $ 4 million. The project is in its initial phase and, as in the 136 detailed projects in Oia, its future is not guaranteed, with some general practitioners already pushing for privacy reasons.

SUBSCRIBE IN NGā Pytopito Kōrero, A daily bulletin curated by our editors and delivers directly to your inbox every day of the week.