New Dunedin Hospital | Pioneering Digital Healthcare Transformation

New Dunedin Hospital will be a fully digital healthcare facility and an important part of the ongoing transformation of New Zealand's health system.

This major new facility, covering two city blocks, is currently the largest healthcare infrastructure project in New Zealand. Te Whatu Ora - Health New Zealand seized the opportunity to not only renew its estate, but to rethink how care is delivered, recentring it around the patient experience and the people of Dunedin will benefit from this.

As one of the country’s largest teaching hospitals, with strong links to the University of Otago’s medical programme, New Dunedin Hospital will be the training ground for new technologies and ways of working that will spread far beyond its 300km-radius catchment.

WSP has been working on digital transformation designing the infrastructure that will support its chosen solutions, both today and over the decades to come, as New Zealand’s health services evolve.

This development brings the opportunity to look at models of care, service provision and the way the community is involved in a broader sense. This is key to addressing equity and working in partnership with Māori to find solutions to improve health outcomes.

operating theatres and procedure rooms

26 26

BEDS

410 410

MRI machines

3 3

Location

Dunedin, New Zealand

Client

Te Whatu Ora – Health New Zealand

Project Status

2021 – First Phase Scheduled for Completion in 2025, Second Phase in 2028

Smart For People, Not For The Sake Of It

The technology planned for New Dunedin Hospital will place it among the world’s most advanced healthcare facilities. But none of it is there for show.

The team worked closely with the project’s clinical planner to identify the many possible pathways that people might take through the building and the wider healthcare system, and then looked at how to digitize those workflows to support a better experience for patients and staff.

“It was never about the solutions, it was about improving how things are done,” says WSP director Roneel Singh. “Anything that’s manual and repetitive can lead to errors and takes away time that could be spent caring for patients. If we can automate that process, then there’s a single source of information that everyone can draw from.”

Making Healthcare Journeys as Painless as Possible

A visit to New Dunedin Hospital has been designed to be a smooth and reassuring process– from the hospital app that patients can use to check in, to the queue management system that allows them to wait wherever they’re most comfortable. When it’s time to head to their appointment, turn-by-turn navigation will help them find their way, with blanket Wi-Fi and cell phone coverage so they’re never in a black spot. For longer stays, they can use the bedside patient engagement system to message clinical staff, choose their meals, videocall family, or stream school classes.

“Normally, patients just get a television to look at. We flipped that, to ask ‘if you’re in hospital, what do you need?’ says Singh. “It’s about shifting the power and putting them in the cockpit of their healthcare journey.”

Resilient, Redundant And Robust

The technology solutions planned for New Dunedin Hospital are based on best practice from digital hospitals that WSP has delivered around the world.

But what sets this design apart is the way that the individual systems have been meticulously stitched together.

By mapping the potential overlaps between different solutions, WSP has built resilience and redundancy into the hospital’s suite of software, just as it has into the hardware infrastructure. The result is an intricate web of interdependent programs, with no single point of failure. It is also vendor-agnostic, so individual pieces of software can be easily swapped out as digital health services evolve.

“We can’t just lift everybody up into this new digital hospital instantly, so we’re trying to create a platform that will allow them to add services in future,” explains Singh. “It’s making it robust and giving it a 10 or 20-year life span, without gold-plating everything so they’re not paying for functionality they don’t need.”

It’s about shifting the power and putting them in the cockpit of their healthcare journey.

Roneel Singh Director of Technology Systems, WSP in Australia

Location of the New Dunedin Hospital within the city.

Welcoming The Whole Community

From the beginning, the New Dunedin Hospital digital experience has been co-created with Māori and Pacific peoples, people who have traditionally had poorer outcomes and a negative perception of the healthcare system. This has shaped everything from the clinical workflows to the functionality of the software, with iwi representatives at almost every meeting or workshop.

One significant cultural difference is many Māori approach healthcare as a family, rather than an individual experience. So other family members might want to access treatment information, or book appointments together, which means that systems need to be designed with this in mind.

It’s about considering different perspectives in a patient’s health journey and not making assumptions on how healthcare should be delivered to the community but working with them.

The New Dunedin Hospital Outpatient Building is on track for delivery in late 2025 with the Inpatient Building due to open in 2029.