Child Health Information Strategy

Child Health Information Strategy
Date of Publication: April 2003

HP3620

The Child Health Information Strategy (CHIS) is an overarching plan to guide the development, collection and use of information about the health of children and young people.

Development of the CHIS is one of the six future directions identified in the Child Health Strategy (Ministry of Health 1998a) that are intended to guide the development and delivery of child health services over the next 10 years. The primary goal of the CHIS is to achieve better health for children in New Zealand by making clinically useful, appropriate, up-to-date, and accurate health information available at every contact between a child and a health professional.

Better child health information is central to improving services and outcomes for children in our diversified health sector. Information collected in line with the strategy will enable authorised child health care providers (for example, general practice teams, well child providers and hospital clinicians) to more easily share relevant information about a child with each other and to identify and follow up children who do not access routine health care such as immunisations and well child checks.

To achieve these child health objectives, the CHIS supports the development of an infrastructure, including consistent data-collection standards, appropriate data-sharing protocols, and provider education and development. Information systems developed on the basis of the strategy will build on existing systems, knowledge and current practice (where appropriate) to develop interlinking information systems incrementally by utilising up-to-date information technology.

There are three components of the CHIS:

1. The first part of the CHIS comprises a hierarchy of registers of children.

All New Zealanders have a unique National Health Index (NHI) number, and information gathered from different providers can therefore be linked to the same person. These registers may comprise General Practice patient management systems or Primary Health Organisation registers, District Health Board district level registers, or a national register of children and the associated clinical data collected at each level.

District and national child health registers need to track movement of children between providers or districts and provide denominator information for monitoring service coverage.

2. The second part of the CHIS is the information technology infrastructure, which securely carries information between local provider systems and regional and national registers.

This requires the development of common data dictionaries, rules for privacy, security and access and systems for linkage to disparate databases such as the National Minimum Dataset and the Medical Warning System. The business rules for data management on the network are being finalised by the Ministry of Health WAVE project (Ministry of Health 2001).

3.The third part of the CHIS is the requirement to develop local and regional service initiatives, which ensure that children who are missing out on well child and other services are contacted and offered services in a culturally and clinically appropriate way.

The implementation of the CHIS requires local providers to begin to work collaboratively towards common health goals, and an innovative contracting environment to facilitate that collaboration. Primary Health Organisations (PHOs) will be an important vehicle for collaborative service provision.

It is anticipated that the information systems required to implement the CHIS will be incrementally introduced, starting with the National Immunisation Register (NIR), and that each step can improve the availability of up-to-date and accurate information at every contact between a child and health services.

It will enable identification, recall and followup of children who are missing out on universal and targeted health services. The implementation of information systems in accordance with the strategy will improve targeting by identifying children and communities with increased need.

It will also improve monitoring of well child services, and provide population level information for planning (both nationally and locally), and for provider, parent and public education and research.

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