The culled IT projects include upgrades in gynaecology and radiology technology. File photo. Photo: Gorodenkoff Productions OU / 123RF
More than jobs are being cut by Health New Zealand's (HNZ) big data and digital cull, with the axing of more than 100 IT projects.
The agency says the mass project cuts will save more than $90m, even with IT capital funding staying the same, and will not introduce any new clinical risks.
It proposed a few days ago to cut almost half of its more than 2000 digital and data jobs.
A list obtained by RNZ shows why not all are needed - it aims to stop or defer 136 IT projects.
These include upgrades to improve booking systems and staff rosters, and upgrades in gynaecology and radiology technology.
While some were only in planning stages, others were underway, leading to sunk cost losses.
"It is important to note that stop/defer decisions do not introduce new clinical risks," said one document.
The chief consideration was how any stoppage or deferral impacted critical services and clinical risk, it added.
The move came with "an opportunity cost of not doing these projects", such as existing clinical risks not being fixed as intended, or the benefits of IT upgrades realised.
But where doctors saw any risks emerging, it could reassess the decisions, acting chief information technology officer Darren Douglass told RNZ in a statement.
"In some cases, activities that were flagged as stop/defer have been restarted or initiated." He did not say how many.
Working out what to cut was done over three months during capital planning for the 2024-25 financial year, when capital funding for IT matched the previous year, Douglass said.
"Prioritisation and decision-making were carried out with input from key operational and clinical stakeholders.
"Digital services activities that could be stopped or deferred due to being lower priority or having poor cost/benefit ratios, have been identified."
But health unions earlier said HNZ Te Whatu Ora told them in October it needed to find another $100m in savings in data and digital areas, on top of already deep cuts.
They warned at the time that "the disestablishment of any one of these projects, programmes or positions may well have significant risks or costs elsewhere in the organisation".
Health NZ's annual review also shows it spent more than $160,000 training five very senior managers recently, including the chief of data and digital, only to then disestablish their jobs.
One major project on the defer-stop list was an upgrade of Windows 2012 operating systems.
This technology lost support from Microsoft's free updates and bug fixes a year ago, and cyber security experts have warned such systems were impacted by thousands of common vulnerabilities and exposures.
The internal HNZ note said its system protections "are considered partially effective", but it had higher priorities.
But Douglass said investment in cybersecurity was not on the list, and that security had improved overall since the 2021 ransomware attack that breached Waikato Hospital services.
"We... regularly detect and contain or block malicious attacks targeting our networks and systems."
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