October 2017 April 2016 | Page 13

Te Puawai
Gabe Rijpma, Sr Director Health and Social Services, Microsoft Asia, delivered a thought
provoking session on the role of technology in changing healthcare delivery. He talked about ‘care
without walls’ and utilisation of patient sensors, monitoring devices, telemetry and virtual care
consultation. He challenged the delegates to consider ‘how positive is a hospital visit?’ and ‘what
outpatient work can be done virtually?’ Focus was on keeping well and use of predictive care
management as well as integration of workflows from service to service and between health
professionals using an ‘intelligent cloud’.
A well-received innovation was the developing work to remove the need for passwords by using
facial recognition. He went on to state that technology isn’t the barrier, so much is now possible,
commitment and capital investment in technology is now the barrier to changing the way we
manage health.
Associate Professor Karen Monsen from the University of Minnesota School of Nursing,
discussed how data from the electronic health record can bring the voice of nursing practice into
policy and research. She used highly effective visual ideas of ‘bling and donuts’ to demonstrate
how ‘big data’ can show the impact of nursing interventions. Dr Monsen challenged evidence
based practice as being rigid, inflexible guidelines, promoting the more flexible practice based
evidence and reported that it is possible to use large datasets of structured and unstructured
information with different approaches to analysis to find out if intervention practices relate to patient
outcome. She encouraged New Zealand nurses to let the data speak and suggested that unlike
the massively complex, non-collaborative health insurer system in the United States, we have a
distinct advantage in collecting data as we have a small country with public health and NHI
systems.
The day continued with more excellent presentations on nursing documentation and electronic
health records, use of apps and websites in health, tele-consultation, nursing observations,
midwifery data systems and nurses leading IT innovation.
Sheree East and Kim Mundell together with their teams really did a great job and were pleased to
announce another conference at Auckland's Sky City on 3 November 2016.

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College of Nurses Aotearoa (NZ) Inc
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