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Tech Excellence Awards Group

Designed Together, Delivered Together - The Collaborative Power Behind the HSE Health App

The HSE Health App recently won “IT Project of the Year - Public Sector” at the recent Tech Excellence Awards. Co-designed with patients, staff, and advocacy groups, the HSE Health App was developed as a HSE project in partnership between the HSE and partner collaborators. The primary aim of the HSE Health App is to empower individuals by providing secure visible access to their health information, access to self-care pathways, improving communication between patients and the health service while enhancing the overall patient experience.

Collaboration

What collaboration means to the app is that from research to production, every step of the way has had joint thinking, working and understanding, to build an innovative patient centred platform.

Every part of the user’s journey in the app is constructed collaboratively, with parallel workstreams feeding into one another. Multiple teams engage with each other to display accurate data and ensure support calls relating to source data is handled correctly. This confirms the HSE Health App as a secure, scalable, and user-friendly platform supported by multiple teams, including:

  • HSE Teams: HSE Digital and HSE Live, Standards and Shared Care Records (SSCR), Chief information Security Office (CISO), Cloud platform (CP), Access to Information, Health Identifiers Service (A2I-HIDs), Integrated Information Service (IIS).
  • Partner collaborators and service providers: Nearform, Dept®, Deloitte Ireland LLP, Context Studio, Waystone and Mandiant, MyGovID (Dept of Social Protection) and Snasta.
  • Patients and advocate groups: Patient Advisory Group, Irish Platform for Patient Organisations, Science and Industry (IPPOSI), Clinical Advisory Group and a Beta 1 Pilot study (Maternity patients in Cork University Maternity Hospital (CUMH).
  • Other Partners: iPMS (HSE patient management system), COVAX (HSE Covid-19 vaccination system), PCRS (Primary Care Reimbursement Schemes), NIO (National Immunisation Office).

Ownership

The app continues to be an evolving development product, with more services, data and features planned for the coming years. Project management oversight, product ownership and support from the HSE Technology and Transformation Project Team ensures development is coordinated, deliverables are timely and cohesion.

Development and Testing

  • Research and insights into how a feature will work and benefit the user is achieved by working with users (and their advocates) to discover ease of use, understanding and ability (HSE Digital, Patient Advisory Group, IPPOSI, disability groups, and subject matter experts).
  • Service design practices (HSE Digital, Context Studio and Deloitte) focus on providing a prototype design to give visual perspective on the needs of the user, reshaping the interaction between services and patients, ensuring a more efficient and satisfactory patient experience.
  • There's the magic of development, which responds to design, taking into consideration the technical background and interactions of each user contact (Nearform).
  • Technical content requires specialist knowledge with architectural practices restructuring digital and organisational aspects of the system to promote interoperability, agility, and scalability (T&T Architects, Nearform, A2I, IIS and CP).
  • Ensuring translation of content in the app provides the user with their preference for how they interact with the HSE (Snasta).
  • Consideration is given for the integration with existing services and websites and if messaging, push notifications and reminders are required for a particular feature (Deloitte). Contact with users and messaging makes use of Salesforce service and marketing cloud to enable secure interaction with the HSE customer service team of HSE Live.
  • The app utilises a “Security by Design” approach, security measures (Waystone and Mandiant) are rigorously tested to ensure a secure platform is built, allowing for teams to mitigate issues identified (IIS, A2I, Nearform, CP).
  • Testing is collaborative (CISO, Nearform, Waystone and Mandiant, A2I, IIS). A pool of testers from all teams assist with UAT testing, and the Nearform performance and accessibility testing ensures the product is ready and has appropriate

Governance

The HSE provides strategic direction, while partners lead their respective domains, ensuring alignment with the project's objectives and joint ways of working.

Leadership is exemplified through collaboration across the project, with a focus on managing key relationships and seeking regular feedback.

Each workstream lead has governance and responsibility to allow the teams to adapt and interface with each other and consider the different perspectives that exist, whilst being aware of any constraints. Programme Level Governance is also provided, by the Clinical Authority Group, Technical Authority Group and Steering Group with oversight from SLT, the HSE Board and others. Each feature has a workstream owner with partner associates to ensure all work delivered achieves the quality of the product, is appropriate to the need, is effective in what it’s supposed to do and to the best ability. The feature owner is from the most appropriate team aligned to the feature, product or service, for optimum input and coordination of development.

Delivery

Collaborative delivery of the HSE Health App has enabled a more personalised relationship between the public and health service providers. By improving patient care, experience and safety, the anticipated benefits of early features include:-

For Patients: Empowered individuals with access to their personalised health information, improved appointment management and a reliable source of health updates. It places the patient at the centre as an active participant in their own healthcare.

Enhanced awareness of maternity appointment details, helping to reduce missed appointments, saving time for patients and service providers, and lowering travel-related emissions. A displayed list of medications, Covid 19 and flu vaccinations and PCRS cards in-App. Users have the ability to access health, well-being and support information relating to their condition, enhancing their knowledge and confidence in self-care.

For the HSE: Enhanced patient engagement, reduced missed appointments and streamlined communication channels and supporting EU requirements in relation to patient access and identification. There is ongoing engagement with advocacy organisations and patient representatives to ensure the app is fit for purpose. The features and content of the patient app will be enhanced and developed over time, through successive releases of the app.

Collaboration for the HSE App combines the strategic thinking, operational and functional excellence, agility, dynamic leadership skills, and strong execution capabilities from various teams to strike a balance between the present and future, whilst maintaining long-term value. This approach defines, designs, and delivers transformation while prioritising interoperability, integrated care, and avoids siloed systems, information, and data. The app enables a more personalised relationship with the health service that includes viewing important appointments (maternity patients initially), signposting, selfcare advice, and information. Patients have access to personalised digital health tools in a secure, convenient and coordinated way. This empowers them with the responsibility for their own health decisions, allowing them to have an active role in making informed decision about their own care to stay healthy. It also empowers them to make shared decisions with healthcare professionals.

The HSE Health App exemplifies successful digital transformation through effective collaboration. The cohesive partnership has enabled various organisations to work together and produce an app that empowers patients, enhances service delivery and positions the collective teams as leaders in digital health innovation. The app will continue to evolve over time, adding more products, services, data and functionality, bringing added value to the patient as well as the HSE.