Health Service Executive Shared Services, Eastern Region, Ireland

With Prospectus, Accenture created the necessary improvement plan in only four months, putting the shared services organization on track for high performance.

Eastern Health Shared Services (EHSS) was established in 2000 to provide a wide range of professional and technical support services—including finance, human resources, procurement and information technology—to Ireland's Eastern Regional Health Authority and the three area health boards in the country's eastern region. By tapping into these centralized services, health care providers can concentrate on planning, arranging, overseeing and coordinating health services for nearly 1.5 million people who live in eastern Ireland, including individuals in the cities of Dublin, Kildare and Wicklow. On January 1, 2005, the new Health Service Executive was established, with full operational responsibility for administering health services in Ireland. The former Eastern Regional Health Authority is now part of the Health Service Executive (HSE), and is known as the HSE Shared Services-Eastern Region.

By applying a shared services model to the HSE Shared Services, regional health executives believed that health care providers would be able to share expertise and overhead expenses, more readily encourage innovation and development and focus on their core business of service delivery.

The HSE Shared Services wanted to develop a road map that would allow it to improve its operational efficiencies and level of customer service further. It wanted to learn what it could do to improve its operations in the short-term. It also wanted to develop a clear vision of the role shared services could play in Ireland's health care sector in five years. Specifically, this future vision would help define the scope of services to be provided and the markets served, and provide a blueprint for how the HSE Shared Services should be organized to meet its health care sector's evolving needs.

For help in developing its short- and long-term strategies and understanding how it could continue to add optimal value in its support of health care service delivery, the HSE Shared Services turned to Accenture and Prospectus, a leading consulting organization in the health sector in Ireland.

Accenture and Prospectus assembled a highly qualified project team with appropriate skills in health care management and delivery, shared services operations and strategy development. They also created an advisory group—comprising executives from Accenture's shared services operations—to provide additional insights and ongoing support for an optimal solution outcome. Together, these resources worked closely with the HSE Shared Services staff to carry out two strands of project work.

In Strand 1, the team conducted a workshop-based operations review that focused on the HSE Shared Services' existing range and scope of services, markets served, core operating principles and governance practices, as well as its organizational capacity to meet current and emerging business requirements. In Strand 2, the Accenture/Prospectus team once again used a workshop-based approach to assess the HSE Shared Services' scope and markets for the next five years. Based on these discussions, the Accenture/Prospectus team was able to refine the future strategy for the HSE Shared Services and provide a set of recommendations that covered service scope, market scope, gap analysis and infrastructure development.

With Accenture's help—and in less than four months—the HSE Shared Services developed a short-term action plan and a longer-term road map that allows the organization to improve service quality and cost effectiveness on an ongoing basis.

Armed with a long-term strategy and implementation plan, the HSE Shared Services is expected to continue its record of improving and expanding services so that the regional health care organizations can concentrate on their core business of health and social care delivery. In this way, the HSE Shared Services is not only advancing on its own journey to high performance, but also enabling health care providers in eastern Ireland to continually improve their ability to serve the area's nearly 1.5 million citizens who rely on them to meet their health care needs.