The Northern Ireland Executive through its Department of Health is responsible for its funding, while the Public Health Agency is the executive agency responsible for the provision of health and social care services across Northern Ireland.

It is free of charge to all citizens of Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom.

For healthcare services such as A&E, patients simply walk in, state their name and date of birth, are given treatment and then leave. Patients are unaware of costs incurred by them using the service. It is sometimes called the NHS, as in England, Scotland and Wales, but differs from the NHS in England and Wales in that it provides social care as well as health care.

The Health and Social Care (Reform) Act (Northern Ireland) 2009 led to a reorganisation of health and social care delivery in Northern Ireland, reducing the number of organisations involved. This Act established the Health and Social Care Board and five Health and Social Care trusts which are responsible for the delivery of primary, secondary and community health care.

Trusts are the statutory bodies responsible for the management of staff, health and social care services on the ground and have control their own budgets.

The 5 regional healthcare trusts are:

Digital Healthcare Solutions in Northern Ireland

Savience are the sole supplier of self-service digital healthcare solutions to the five Health and Social Care Trusts in Northern Ireland. Our digital healthcare solutions in Northern Ireland are installed in all the hospitals that provide outpatient services across the region and are integrated with all their PAS systems.

Savience Connect Integration in Northern Ireland

Savience provide a range of integration services across Northern Ireland. Currently Savience Connect enables successful data exchange between all PAS systems, the Emergency Departments systems in the Ulster (eEMS) and Altnagelvin (Symphony), Community systems from EMIS (ePEX mental health), Yarra Software (LCID) and Civica (PARIS). The integration between the Regional Radiotherapy centre using the Aria system for Varian and Radiology systems from SECTRA is currently being completed using HL7.

PAS connections are made using either HL7 messages or our scripting tool, Boston Workstation.Boston Workstation is deployed at the Regional Fertility Centre at Belfast, the PAS systems at Omagh and Altnagelvin, and updates the Symphony ED system at Altnagelvin.


Regionally provided services

Many health specialty services are provided across Northern Ireland on a regional basis. For example, Ophthalmology appointments made for patients on the PAS system in Belfast may be held at clinics run in locations at any of the other 4 Trusts.

Savience Connect is the digital healthcare solution which provides integration services across the whole region. Connect pulls together appointments made across the variety of different systems, which enable patients with regionally, as well as locally, arranged appointments to be able to use the self-service kiosks located at all the hospitals and successfully check in for their appointment.

Click to read more on how Savience provides 65 kiosks across 30 separate locations, enable nearly 5,000 patients a day to check in seamlessly for their appointments.

Savience in action

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