The HSE is introducing an IT System for managing Infection Prevention and Control. eHealth & Disruptive Technologies (eHealth) and the Antimicrobial Resistance and Infection Control Programme (AMRIC), are working to deliver this project in collaboration with Acute and Community services. This project will deliver improved patient safety in relation to infection prevention control and deliver higher quality healthcare.
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted how challenging it is to manage the threat of serious infectious diseases. Healthcare systems have faced unprecedented challenges during this pandemic. IT surveillance systems can support testing, contact tracing and outbreak management. These all help to provide safe care for our patients.
The project will also deliver benefits to staff. These benefits include reductions on time spent on common daily Infection Prevention Control (IPC) tasks. This releases IPC teams to support staff on the frontline to provide safe care for patients and service users.
These systems integrate data from different hospital systems. This provides actionable insights, and facilitates more efficient clinical intervention, reporting, and accessibility.
The system will also support enhanced clinical audit and there will be a more comprehensive approach to management of Infection Prevention Control risks.
The system will:
- Provide increased information flow.
- Improve our health systems ability to track compliance.
- Enable personalised, preventative and proactive care.
- Deliver enhanced health workforce productivity.
- Create greater efficiencies in obtaining patient information.
- Improve record keeping, administration and referrals.
- Assist in the timely management of outbreaks.
- Reduce the length and incidence of outbreaks.
- Replace manual tracking with a suite of reporting, monitoring and outbreak management tools.
- Generate real-time alerts.
- Support a proactive service rather than the current reactive service.
If you would like more information or would like to speak to someone working on this project, please contact Deirdre.Mullins@hse.ie