The Health Service Executive (HSE) provides all of Ireland’s public health services in hospitals and communities across the country. The aim of its Winter Plan for 2020-2021, published in September 2020, was to mitigate the challenges brought about by the COVID19 pandemic. One of the initiatives to support this was the Health Performance Visualisation Platform (HPVP). It was envisioned that the HPVP would provide the necessary data flows and analytics capacity to see what is happening, in terms of activity, waiting lists, bed flow blockages etc., across the hospital network in real time. Specifically, the system would provide real-time health data and trends across outpatient services, surgery (theatre and procedure rooms), emergency departments, bed management and diagnostics, as outlined in the Winter Planning document. It was envisioned the HPVP would be implemented commencing September 2020 with completion of phase 1 by December 2021 with 28 hospitals live.
However, The Irish Independent reports, some of the Ireland’s biggest hospitals have refused to share operational and other data with the HPVP, including the Mater Hospital, St James’s, Tallaght, Beaumont, and St Vincent’s.
The roll-out of the platform, called SystemView, is being chaired by HSE, and is being developed by Healthcare Logic, an Australian-headquartered company, via its Irish subsidiary, Sláintecare Logic.
According to The Irish Independent, the HSE has said 24 out of 28 hospitals in a first phase of the project are using it. Last week’s Sláintecare progress update stated by the end of last year the system had “limited functionality”, and was aiming to “go live in early 2022”, with the aim to have HPVP used in 50 hospitals in total. This phase aims to provide “an automated approach to acute hospital information management, with three levels of visibility, at national, hospital group, and regional level”. However, so many hospitals showing opposition to the project appears to be a considerable setback.
One problem identified in phase one iteration of SystemView is the systems inability to follow the same patient over multiple service providers. Some patients are on the waiting list to see a number of specialists, or for a number of procedures.
Read more:
- Irish Independent 20/02/2022: Key hospitals refuse to share data with new performance platform.
- HSE: Winter Planning within the COVID-19 Pandemic October 2020-April 2021. September 2020