A key highlight of this year’s Hamilton-based HiNZ organised event was being part of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Experiential Village. The purpose of the village was to present attendees with a fusion of health and technology. This was the first time that primary and community healthcare were a major contributor to the annual HiNZ event. The village provided delegates with the opportunity to get hands on experience with current digital health tools and understand health informatics trends of the future. With over 1400 attendees, the village saw a lot of foot traffic.
The village was a stand out feature of the event, being entirely made of cardboard. The rationale of the cardboard village was to ensure that booths and display areas could be reused at future events – an admirable sustainable approach that we look forward to being adopted at more conferences.

A huge thank you to John Macaskill-Smith for his vision and drive to make this village a reality, and Alex Poor for getting us and N4 involved. Acknowledgement too, to AWS for their sponsorship of the village, and the other digital health focused companies that joined us to really make the village hum.
For more on our partnership with N4 and how data sharing can work in a primary and community healthcare setting, see our media release here.
Conference themes and trends
A focus for this annual event is always the planning, networking and collaboration opportunities around the future of the NZ healthcare system. We were pleased to see that interconnectivity of healthcare data was a recurring theme for speakers and delegates alike.
I joined the panel presentation for the “Health Informatics in the Wilds of Primary Care” segment. I presented as part of the second session on “Get the fax out of here”. You can watch my presentation to understand more about how Eightwire evolved, how the NZ healthcare industry is using our product, and the key challenges we’re overcoming here.
Would we head to Digital Health Week 2020?
Absolutely. This conference is a great event to meet and network with DHBs and PHOs around the country. It also has representation from GPs, medical directors and health academics. For health informatics companies wanting to extend their sales reach, increase their brand awareness and monitor health trends, this is a useful event to attend.
The benefits of being able to collaborate and learn from medical professionals and primary healthcare representatives within a few days is invaluable in terms of gaining more insights for your business and connecting with your stakeholders and users.