A Stalis Perspective on the National EHR and Digital Transformation of Health and Social Care in Ireland
STALIS Bridging the Data Gap: Enabling Ireland’s Digital for Care Vision WHITE PAPER A Stalis Perspective on the National EHR and Digital Transformation of Health and Social Care in Ireland
PUBLICATION DATE October 2025
PREPARED BY Stalis Bloxham Mill Business Centre Banbury OX15 4FF
www.stalis.com
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Executive Summary
Ireland’s Digital for Care – A Digital Health Framework 2024–2030 sets out a national vision for a connected, data-driven health service - one where patients, professionals, and partners collaborate across shared digital ecosystems to deliver safer, more efficient, and more equitable care. Digital Health is key to supporting the health service in delivering universal healthcare, in planning for the population’s health needs, building integrated care models, and ensuring safety, quality and sustainability in delivering health services. At the heart of this transformation lies the National Electronic Health Record (EHR) programme. This is a multi-year initiative that will unify patient data across Ireland’s six health regions, supported by the National Shared Care Record and National Patient App. The implementation of a National EHR solution for the HSE is a critical step towards modernising Ireland's healthcare infrastructure, ensuring that patients receive the highest quality of care in a timely and efficient manner, in line with the Sláintecare vision.
STALIS IMPACT As a trusted partner in healthcare data management, and with over 10 years of deep experience working in Ireland, Stalis is uniquely positioned to help deliver on this vision. We’ve supported NHS digital transformation for over three decades, specializing in data migration, archiving, integration, and quality improvement, to guarantee that the data foundations underpinning clinical systems are complete, accurate, and trusted.
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Supporting Ireland’s Digital for Care Vision
The Digital for Care framework outlines six strategic principles to guide Ireland’s digital health transformation by 2030. At Stalis, we see these principles as directly aligned with our mission, helping healthcare providers unlock the full value of their data to deliver connected, high-quality, patient-centred care. Our expertise in data services enables the foundations required to make this vision a reality.
Patients as Empowered Partners The framework’s ambition to provide every citizen with access to their own digital health record depends on the completeness, accuracy, and availability of underlying patient data. Stalis supports this by ensuring that data from legacy EPRs, PAS, and departmental systems is cleansed, structured, and consolidated to create a single, trusted view of every individual. We also support organisations in meeting data privacy, consent, and audit requirements, ensuring transparency and compliance as data becomes patient-facing.
Digitally Enabled Workforce & Workplace - A digitally confident workforce requires reliable access to high-quality information at the point of care. Stalis enables this by transforming fragmented legacy data into usable, interoperable formats that integrate seamlessly with new EHR and business systems. By delivering robust data readiness programmes, we help hospitals and community teams focus on patient care - not data administration - as they transition to digital-first environments.
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Supporting Ireland’s Digital for Care Vision
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Digitally Enabled & Connected Care Interoperability sits at the core of the Digital for Care framework — and of every Stalis project. We connect systems across acute, community, primary care, and pharmacy settings to ensure data flows securely and consistently. Using open standards such as HL7 FHIR, SNOMED CT, and IHE profiles, we enable clinicians to access accurate, up-to- date information wherever their patients receive care, supporting the HSE’s vision for a single, longitudinal health record. Digital Health Ecosystem & Innovation Ireland’s goal of building an innovation-driven digital health ecosystem relies on open, standards-based data. Stalis works with providers, vendors, and integrators to enable innovation without compromising data integrity. Our experience in complex, multi- vendor environments helps organisations adopt new tools such as AI, RPA, and patient apps while maintaining safety, compliance, and scalability.
Data-Driven Services The value of digital transformation depends on data that is complete, validated, and accessible for insight. Stalis provides data quality profiling, remediation, and governance frameworks that enable organisations to make informed decisions from trusted data sources. Our methodologies underpin real-time analytics, population health planning, and operational dashboards, supporting national priorities around predictive care, capacity planning, and evidence-based policy. Secure Foundations & Digital Enablers Every digital health initiative must rest on secure, well-governed data. Stalis supports the establishment of cyber-resilient, compliant data environments, providing secure data migration and long-term archiving solutions aligned with GDPR, the forthcoming Health Information Bill, and European Health Data Space (EHDS) standards. Our proven frameworks create the confidence and continuity essential for the rollout of national EHRs and the Shared Care Record.
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Building the Data Foundations for Ireland’s National EHR Programme Collectively, these six principles form a policy mandate for a unified digital health ecosystem - one that provides every citizen with a secure, connected, and longitudinal health record. To realise this vision, healthcare organisations must first solve the data challenge: ensuring that legacy patient data is accurately migrated, intelligently mapped, and compliantly archived. Our solutions provide the trusted data foundations on which the HSE can confidently build Ireland’s digital health future.
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The Data Imperative
Every digital transformation, regardless of system, vendor, or scale ultimately succeeds or fails on the quality, completeness and trustworthiness of its data.
As Ireland moves toward the deployment of integrated, enterprise-grade Electronic Health Records (EHRs) under the Digital for Care framework, legacy data represents one of the most significant and underestimated risks to successful implementation. Without expert intervention, the transition from fragmented, vendor-specific systems to a unified EHR can introduce serious risks, like: Incomplete or Inaccurate Patient Records Discrepancies in legacy data - duplicate records, outdated demographic details, inconsistent coding, or missing clinical information, which can all seriously compromise patient safety at the point of care.
Incomplete data migration may result in: Critical allergies, diagnoses, or medications not transferring correctly. Lost or mismatched patient identifiers across multiple systems. Clinical decisions being made on incomplete or inaccurate records.
Stalis mitigates these risks through comprehensive data profiling, cleansing, and validation processes that identify and correct errors even before migration. Our clinically led data assurance framework ensures that migrated records are accurate, reconciled, and most importantly trusted by the clinicians who rely on them. Non-Compliant Data Retention and Archiving Legacy systems often contain data subject to retention under HSE, GDPR, and medico-legal requirements. When organisations decommission these systems without a compliant archival strategy, they risk:
Breach of legal data retention policies. Loss of audit trails required for medico-legal defence. Significant cost exposure if systems must be reinstated to retrieve historic data.
Stalis’ CareView platform provides a secure, searchable archive that meets national and international data protection standards, allowing historic patient data to be retained, audited, and accessed as required, without maintaining the cost and complexity of legacy systems. This enables safe, compliant decommissioning and ensures continuity of access for clinicians, administrators, and patients.
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The Data Imperative
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Unstructured or Incompatible Data Formats Legacy data is often unstructured, coded inconsistently, or stored in proprietary formats that inhibit interoperability. Without standardisation, this data cannot be integrated into modern, standards-based systems or used effectively for analytics and population health management. Stalis’ data transformation and mapping methodologies convert disparate legacy data into structured, standards-aligned formats using internationally recognised terminologies such as SNOMED CT, ICD-10, and LOINC, and interoperability frameworks such as HL7 FHIR. This ensures that information is portable, usable, and future-proof across the HSE’s regional and national systems. Loss of Clinical Context and Metadata Beyond the data itself, many legacy systems contain contextual information, including timestamps, clinician notes, document attachments, and audit trails. These important datasets provide the necessary clinical and legal provenance of care. If this data is not preserved during migration, the clinical record becomes incomplete and its evidential value diminished. Stalis’ extraction and transformation processes maintain the full clinical narrative and metadata associated with every record, ensuring the integrity of the data and its continued relevance within the new system. Disruption to Operations and Change Fatigue EHR projects often place significant strain on already stretched IT and clinical teams. Manual extraction and validation processes consume time and introduce operational risk, while lack of visibility into data readiness can delay go-lives. Stalis provides fully managed, end-to-end migration programmes that integrate seamlessly with vendor and system integrator timelines, reducing disruption to business-as-usual activities. Our project teams work alongside clinical and technical stakeholders to provide predictable delivery, transparent reporting, and measurable assurance at every stage.
Stalis: Delivering Data that Follows the Patient
By combining technical precision, clinical understanding, and governance excellence, Stalis ensures that data not only transfers safely, but retains its clinical meaning, compliance integrity, and operational value in the digital environment. Our mission is to ensure that data follows the patient safely and meaningfully into the future, therefore forming the foundation of trust, quality, and insight on which Ireland’s National EHR programme will depend.
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How Stalis Supports Ireland’s Digital for Care Ambition
Data Migration and Transformation Stalis has led some of the UK’s most complex EHR data migrations. These include transitions to Epic, MEDITECH, and Oracle Health, across acute, community, and mental health settings. We provide:
End-to-end data extraction, transformation, and load (ETL) services. Specialist clinical data mapping aligned to FHIR and SNOMED standards. Clinically led data validation and reconciliation to ensure integrity at go-live.
Data Archiving and Compliance Our CareView solution provides a secure, compliant archive for legacy systems, ensuring long-
term data access while enabling cost reduction and decommissioning. Meets retention and medico-legal requirements across jurisdictions.
Provides safe, searchable access to clinical, administrative, and diagnostic data. Reduces ongoing licensing and hosting costs associated with legacy applications.
Integration and Interoperability Stalis solutions are vendor-neutral and system-agnostic - enabling connectivity across diverse environments. We align with national standards and frameworks, including:
HL7 v2/v3 and FHIR SNOMED CT, ICD-10 NHS and HSE interoperability frameworks European Health Data Space (EHDS) requirements
Data Quality and Governance We build data quality improvement into every migration and archive project, using validation and reporting tools to ensure data meets clinical and governance standards, creating the trusted foundations EHRs depend on. EHR Programme Delivery We’ve supported some of the largest regional EHR programmes in the UK and Europe. Our Programme Delivery team provides the leadership and expertise needed to bring complex programmes under control and deliver results.
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Lessons from the U.K.
Stalis has delivered data programmes supporting some of the largest EHR implementations in Europe, including:
HSCNI encompass – Data services partner for Northern Ireland’s regional EHR, powered by Epic, covering 1.9m patients. Manchester Foundation Trust - Data services partner for the largest NHS Epic EHR deployment to date Mid and South Essex - First of type Oracle Health regional EHR deployment across Acute and Community Sheffield Teaching Hospitals - Data services partner to one of the largest NHS Acute Trusts as they deployment Oracle Health’s EHR Mid and East Cheshire - First of type regional deployment of MEDITECH’s Expanse EHR Our experience has shown that successful EHR programmes share three characteristics: 1. Data is treated as a clinical asset - owned, governed, and validated by care teams. 2. Migration and archiving are planned from the outset , not as an afterthought. 3. Neutral data specialists play a pivotal role in bridging vendor and organisational boundaries.
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Partnership Opportunity for Ireland
As Ireland prepares to implement its National EHR, Stalis can help the HSE and regional partners:
Develop data readiness assessments for legacy systems. Define migration and archiving strategies aligned to governance and risk frameworks. Implement repeatable, scalable methodologies for data transfer across vendors. Support regional teams with data quality assurance, validation, and go-live support. Build confidence in data as a shared strategic asset across the health ecosystem. Ireland’s Digital for Care strategy provides a bold, future-facing blueprint for transformation, one that places data, people, and partnership at its core. By investing in robust data foundations, Ireland can accelerate its journey toward a truly connected health service — where clinicians have the information they need, patients are empowered through access and transparency, and every interaction adds to a single, trusted record of care.
Content is the property of Stalis and may not be distributed or reproduced without permission.
Stalis
Stalis is a specialist provider in delivering successful data migration and data archive services to the NHS with 40 years experience.
We offer a complete end-to-end service for data extraction, data quality assurance, transformation, migration and archiving across all healthcare settings. We believe that behind every dataset is a person, and that safe, accurate data management is critical to delivering quality care. Our ethos is rooted in putting people first: from safeguarding sensitive patient information to ensuring professionals have reliable access to the data they need, when they need it.
We treat every migration project not just as a technical task, but as a vital part of supporting better outcomes for everyone.
In the world of healthcare data migration, Stalis has earned the kind of trust you'd associate with names like Cisco, Microsoft, or Oracle. That’s the level they operate at.
Robbie Cline London North West Healthcare NHS Trust
www.stalis.com Bloxham Mill Business Centre, Banbury OX15 4FF 01608 810015 enquiries@stalis.com
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