Health informatics community priming in a small nation: the New Zealand experience.

New Zealand (NZ) has a rapidly expanding health information technology (IT) development industry and wide-ranging use of informatics, especially in the primary health sector. The New Zealand government through the National Health IT Board (NHITB) has promised to provide shared care health records of core information for all New Zealanders by 2014. One of the major barriers to improvement in IT use in healthcare is the dearth of trained and interested clinicians, management and technical workforce. Health Informatics New Zealand (HINZ) and the academic community in New Zealand are attempting to remedy this by raising awareness of health informatics at the grass roots level via free "primer" workshops and by developing a sustainable cross-institutional model of educational opportunities. Support from the NHITB has been forthcoming, and the workshops start in early 2013. This poster presents the process, development and preliminary findings of this work.