The health sector knows what good looks like

I wasn't at Digital Health Week NZ 2025 — our kaupapa lead Bronwyn Scott was there and shared her reflections in a previous pānui. She promised we'd be watching this space, and we have. So here I am, having read the post-conference report, From the Stage, and it mirrors a lot of what we hear from communities navigating the intersection of their digital and health worlds.

Honestly, I was jazzed to find so many people refusing to let equity stay abstract.

A rural health strategist made a point that's hard to argue with: AI systems trained on urban datasets will fail rural communities and tāngata whenua by design. A disability advocate opened with a story: a young woman whose health monitoring app required voice authentication she couldn't use. TLDR; When you design without the people most affected in the room, you build exclusion into the foundation.

Then there was this, from Health New Zealand's Chief Medical Officer Dame Helen Stokes-Lampard:

"The digital divide [must be tackled] to prevent further advantages for the already privileged."

That's not something you usually hear from a Chief Medical Officer at a health technology conference. It matters, big time.

The report surfaces this tension the sector is still working through. Equity as something people say versus equity as something that actually shapes decisions. Take the conference centrepiece, the government's new 10-year Health Digital Investment Plan. Equity doesn't appear as a named objective among the plan's five.

The tools to do better already exist and recent New Zealand research on Māori health data governance makes that case clearly*, but the will to embed them at the top level is still missing. Another example, Māori health framing runs through the conference report with kaupapa Māori voices centred in several sessions, though Pacific communities show up in the disparity data but not in the dedicated sessions or framing.

This tension got harder to ignore in the weeks after the conference. The MediMap security breach forced aged care, disability and community health providers across Aotearoa back to manual systems. It wasn't isolated. Manage My Health suffered a separate breach affecting more than 100,000 people. Tracey Martin from Hinz Aged Care Association said it plainly: cybersecurity and system resilience are patient safety issues, not IT issues.

The communities most affected aren't abstractions. More than 70% of those affected in the Manage my Health breach were in Northland, one of the most under-resourced regions in the country and home to one of the highest proportions of Māori in Aotearoa. Across the country, Pasifika communities were also counting the cost. Pacific health worker Lagi Taufao was clear:

"Our people share a lot of information with the health system because we're managing diabetes, heart disease, asthma — things that affect whole families. When that data isn't protected, it feels like we've been let down again."

General Practice New Zealand's position paper, Prevention is protection: Securing digital primary care for the decade ahead, calls for digital primary care systems to be treated as critical national infrastructure, with enforceable minimum security standards and independent certification for vendors. GPNZ deputy chair Justin Butcher notes that oversight remains inconsistent even as patient portals, shared records and electronic referrals have become essential to how primary care works. And expecting small providers to absorb growing digital obligations within existing margins isn't realistic or sustainable.

I'd go a step further. Sustainable digital transformation requires genuine investment in digital literacy, for our people and the health workforce across Aotearoa alike. A University of Otago study in BMC Medical Education found medical graduates are potentially underprepared for the digital healthcare environment, identifying four core competency gaps that curricula need to close. Uneven digital literacy among clinicians is a digital equity issue in its own right.

The sector knows what good looks like. It can name the digital divide, centre whānau, call for co-design with disabled communities, articulate a rural-first framework. The harder part is embedding those values into investment decisions, procurement standards and governance. The goal is to make equity the default, not the dedicated session.

References

HiNZ. (2025). From the Stage: Digital Health Week NZ 2025 post-conference report.

Health New Zealand Te Whatu Ora. (2025). Health Digital Investment Plan (HDIP). October 2025.

*Kremer, L., Crengle, S., Bartholomew, K., and Kukutai, T. (2025). The Māori Health Data Governance Model: A planning and protocol checklist. First Nations Health and Wellbeing: The Lowitja Journal, 3.

PMN News. (2026, January 10). Pacific communities in NZ pay the price as government blamed for health data breach.

General Practice New Zealand. (2026). Prevention is protection: Securing digital primary care for the decade ahead.

Sumner, B., Martin, R., Gladman, T., Wilkinson, T.J., and Grainger, R. (2025). Understanding the gap: a balanced multi-perspective approach to defining essential digital health competencies for medical graduates. BMC Medical Education, 25(1), 682.