Integrated Healthcare Capabilities

Future health service capability requirements, identified in consultation with the HSE National Directors and clinicians, set a compelling vision for how healthcare will be delivered in the future. These capabilities have been distilled into five focus areas which are key to facilitating the seamless delivery of healthcare across integrated care pathways and all stages of care, as illustrated in Figure A. The detailed capability requirements captured from each National Director are included in the appendix to this document.

• Care Delivery Enablement - Provides a series of clinical and care delivery capabilities which digitally enable  processes allowing data to be captured as a by-product of clinical activity, sharing of patient information, better quality of care, more clinician time spent with patients and greater ability for patients to participate in their own care.
• Electronic Health Records - Creates and enriches the patients’ electronic health records at each patient contact and across settings, stores the detailed care information at activity level, and feeds the summary care record to enable patient care along the pathway
• Cross Setting Information Integration - Delivers the required integration across the patient pathway including information flows and process standardisation across care settings, enabling the summary care record at a patient level, and seamless patient transition between settings.
• Health Service Insight - Delivers the information management, reporting and analysis solutions and processes which provide timely, reliable information and decision support for patients, clinicians, and management from the micro level (e.g. individual patients or treatments) up to the macro view (e.g. system wide performance scorecards, population health trends). 
• National Support Systems - Provides the national backbone for the core support service – finance, procurement, and HR – and is crucial for integrated, efficient management of the health system, and enabling the shift of more care community settings.

The delivery of the target capabilities represents a transformation of scale and ambition unprecedented in the Irish health system to date. Successful delivery will require significant investment, leadership commitment, extensive clinician involvement, and programmatic approach with dedicated resourcing, effective governance and strong benefits realisation practices. Indicatively, the programme is expected to span 5+ years – however, a business case and a more detailed programme plan needs to be developed as a next step.Implementation of these new capabilities will support the delivery of healthcare benefits to the population of Ireland, and the Irish society and economy. They will also have a profound impact on how different stakeholders experience the health service – from patients to general practitioners to hospital clinicians and community healthcare providers, and the managers of the health system. The new capabilities are described in more detail in Section 3 of this document.