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Healthcare IT, Technology

Healthcare IT ‘specialised’

By Jianggan Li | 25 September 2008

Small and far away from major markets, New Zealand has traditionally been ‘underserved’ by international healthcare IT vendors, according to Grant McPherson, Regional Director South/South East Asia at New Zealand Trade & Enterprise (NZTE).

McPherson says this stimulated the country to develop a whole range of applications themselves. A collaborative approach has been adopted where government, vendors, healthcare organisations and practitioners work closely together to drive innovation and adoption.

One of the trends in Healthcare IT, as seen by McPherson, is specialisation. “Increasingly, we see interesting information technologies arise for particular areas of healthcare,” he says.

These include clothes based on smart fabric which automatically captures vital signs and transmit the data into the computer system. Wound scanners are able to assess injuries by capturing the data for the computer applications to analyse. Medical instruments are becoming more intelligent with additional attention by operators and the IT industry.

There are also other programmes such as medical content delivery through HDTV and centrally monitor infants’ body temperature.

Now healthcare IT makes 12 per cent of the country’s entire software services industry, and McPherson says many of these innovations can be replicated overseas, based on the understanding of each country’s particular needs.

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