Up until now, individual health boards and health agencies would develop their own ICT systems, sometimes in isolation from each other, with funding for these initiatives doled out directly by the Department to each organisation.
The Prospectus report, which was one of three reports on the national health service, recommended the development of a National Shared Services Centre to improve efficiencies and value for money in areas such as ICT investment.
Shared service centres have been adopted by commercial organisations as a way to increase the cost effectives of value chain activities supporting the delivery of core services.
The idea behind the NSSC is to provide a centre for knowledge and expertise that can produce economies of scale by centralising wide-spread activities and major activities in one unit, and also deliver savings by cutting out duplication.
For instance, Eastern Health Shared Services, which provides shared services to the Eastern Regional Health Board and the three area health boards in the region, has developed an Intranet for its clients that allows them and their employees to access information from a central source, as well as a call-centre operation that handled 47,000 enquiries in 2002.
Prospectus said that the introduction of a National Shared Services Centre would reduce administrative costs, improve the management and standardisation of business processes, provide a better quality of service, and free-up resources that can be used elsewhere in the system.
The consultancy company said that the Centre could provide a range of shared services to the Health Service Executive, which under the reforms will replace the health boards. These included IT processes and support, HR services such as administration, and customer services.
It could also deliver core processing functions and shared services to the wider health system such as call centres for patient information and services, pensions and payroll administration, and the maintenance of registers. The NSSC should also be responsible for the development of new services such as e-health initiatives.
It is thought that many of these recommendations have been adopted in the Health Service Reform Programme. The Programme states that the NSCC will be one of three divisions of the Health Service Executive (HSE).
According to the Programme, the provision of shared services provides the opportunity for "considerable" economies of scale and the development of a single standard across the health service. The use of shared services will be mandatory for statutory agencies, while publicly-funded voluntary providers of health care will be able to access NSSC services through agreements with the HSE, but only if it is believed that efficiencies can be gained by doing so.
Quelle: electricnews