In Brief

The Challenge

Ireland’s healthcare information systems need to be improved as part of a more general step-up in resilience in the sector. RECONNECT offers practical benefits for those groups with the most complex clinical presentations and with the greatest ongoing need for health services, who are particularly vulnerable to any additional shocks to the health ecosystem (high risk patients): 

  1. Direct/indirect patient care decision support: to inform individual patient care in the context of the patient risk group and to ensure these populations can be readily identified for specific focused treatments/preventative measures where a new or emerging health threat is identified. 
  2. Service activity metrics - analytical support: including quality assurance and improvement of services to patient groups at national, health service and practitioner levels, this ensures that measures taken in the face of new threats have been effective in minimising negative health impacts. 
  3. Planning, monitoring and evaluation support: services focused and tailored to the patient risk groups both for ongoing service delivery and to support planning for future currently unknown threats to population health. 
  4. Generation of new knowledge through scientific methodologies: address pressing health service, epidemiological and clinical questions of the day particularly in situations of new or evolving health threats. 

The Solution

Our solution delivers a digital ecosystem to acquire and integrate data from disparate healthcare sources. Our working case study, using the Hospital Inpatient Enquiry (HIPE), the Chronic Disease Management (CDM) system, Primary Care Eligibility and Reimbursement Scheme (PCeRS), and Diabetic RetinaScreen, provides an example of a current requirement which cannot be accomplished today without expensive third party consultants to build a one-off solution. This is one of the planned case studies. While we will address structural and semantic heterogeneities in the system, at the data level, the lack of Individual Health Identifier in the current healthcare systems is a significant obstacle to the creation of integrated data. A separate process, which takes place just before the Data Transformation layer, known as Record Linkage is required.

The Team

  • Team Lead: Prof. Mark Roantree, Dublin City University
  • Team Co-Lead: Prof Patricia Kearney, University College Cork  

Societal Impact Champion

  • Fionnuala Donohoe, Health Service Executive