- Health New Zealand’s finances are tracking with Excel
- The body operates 6,000 applications and 100 digital networks
- There are no immediate plans to modernize its systems
A recently published report has revealed that Health New Zealand (HNZ) has depended on a single Microsoft Excel spreadsheet as its main financial management tool.
Established in 2022, HNZ was designed to replace 20 district health joints in the name of profitability efficiency and the consistency of the service, but so far, the body has depended on the basic spreadsheet of the spreadsheet that has been considered inappropriate for its purpose.
A Deloitte report found that HNZ lost control of “critical levers that drive financial results”, which mainly blamed “the inability to identify and respond to the disconnection between expenses and income”, among other factors.
New Zealand medical care was executed on an Excel spreadsheet
HNZ reported a deficit of $ 1,013 billion against a balance budget in 2022/23, and by 2023/24, Doilette says that financial challenges were “increasingly evident.”
In general, the report specified five main problems with the Excel -based system: the coded financial data made updates and the tracking of origin difficult; Errors such as incorrectly released accumulations were not collected until later; The changes in previous periods would not flow to consolidated data; Limited monitoring allows easy data manipulation; and entries and changes are prone to simple human errors, such as typographic errors or missing zeros.
“The use of an Excel spreadsheet file to track and inform the financial performance for an organization of expenses of $ 28 billion raises significant concerns,” Deloitte summarized.
Separately, the Minister of Health, Simeon Brown, recently revealed in a speech that HNZ operates approximately 6,000 applications and 100 digital networks: he described the digital infrastructure of the health system as “fragmented.”
Despite Darming’s report, the Minister of Health has not revealed any immediate plan to replace Excel. A potential health infrastructure entity is being considered to manage physical and digital assets, but a timeline has not been established. Techradar Pro He has contacted Health New Zealand for a comment.
