Health and Social Care Northern Ireland (HSCNI) is working with healthcare technology specialist, Tegria, and digital health consultancy, Cloud21 to support its national digital transformation programme. 

The organisations will help to deliver Northern Ireland’s Encompass programme – a decade long initiative to implement a fully integrated electronic health and care record across acute physical, mental health, community care and social services.

Under the agreement, Tegria and Cloud21, will provide strategic guidance, programme readiness and electronic patient record (EPR) implementation expertise.

WHY IT MATTERS

Northern Ireland is set to become the first UK country to integrate a fully integrated electronic health and care record across all care settings.

The Encompass programme aims to deliver improvements to outcomes for patients by making it easier for health and care professionals to deliver high-quality and safe care, improved efficiencies, and greater collaboration.  

It will replace a patchwork of legacy systems and paper-based processes with a complete picture of a patient’s health and social care.

THE LARGER CONTEXT

HSCNI recently announced that it has partnered with Swedish med tech firm Sectra to combine pathology and radiology images and reports in the same medical imaging system.

Also, GPs and other primary care prescribers across Northern Ireland have been given access to decision support technology at the point of prescribing, following an agreement with medicines optimisation firm First Databank (FDB).

ON THE RECORD

Dr Tony Corkett, CEO, Cloud21 said: “The HSCNI is leading the way in advocating that every technology programme needs equal funding and support for people, processes and change management to be successful, and a national transformation programme of this scale is no exception.”

Chief digital information officer (CDIO) for HSCNI, Dan West, said: “Tegria and Cloud21 stood out because of their strong understanding of the challenges that we face with such a large-scale and radical digital transformation initiative.

“They quickly provided us with strategic leadership at a challenging time in the programme, while health and care systems across the world were dealing with the impact of the COVID pandemic. They brought people who understand large scale implementation and clinical transformation programmes to help us build a more sustainable and resilient service through digital.

“Together, Tegria and Cloud21 have proven experience of working with our EPR supplier, which has been extremely valuable to bring into the mix. We’ve seen a well-co-ordinated and high-quality response, and without them, we wouldn’t have been able to move the programme to where it is today.”

Justin Jozwik, managing director, International, Tegria, said: “Our experience in the US with the operational and cultural challenges of large-scale digital transformation across health and care systems nationally, combined with Cloud21’s hands on experience in the UK, means together we are well-placed to support HSCNI’s Encompass programme and provide high quality strategic guidance, as well as the practical expertise that Tegria and Cloud 21 are well-known for.”