encompass Northern Ireland Healthcare Case Study

Digital Healthcare Transformation in Northern Ireland

Discover how Telefónica Tech and encompass revolutionised healthcare delivery

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About the customer

Modernising healthcare delivery

encompass is a transformative digital health programme in Northern Ireland, designed to unify patient records and modernise healthcare delivery across all five Health and Social Care Trusts. It delivers a single, integrated patient health record accessible across all care settings, from hospitals to community services, enhancing continuity of care, patient safety, and clinical decision-making.

Representing one of the most ambitious digital health initiatives in the UK, encompass aims to streamline workflows and enable data-driven healthcare across the region. All five Trusts successfully went live with the platform between November 2023 and May 2025, marking a major milestone in regional healthcare integration and digital maturity.

The challenge

Setting new standards for excellence in healthcare

The Northern Ireland health system faced significant challenges stemming from fragmented legacy systems, inconsistent patient records, and inefficient manual processes. There was a high level of digital immaturity across all areas of the sector, which impacted adversely on patient outcomes, as well as staff working conditions. These challenges hindered clinical decision-making, delayed discharges, and increased operational risk. The need for a unified, modern platform was critical to improving care quality and operational efficiency.

The encompass programme was initiated to resolve these systemic inefficiencies by delivering a unified, patient-centred electronic health care record (EHCR) across all five Health and Social Care Trusts. The programme was driven by a shared vision to set new standards for excellence in healthcare, placing patient outcomes at the forefront of every decision.

In May 2025, the Epic rollout was successfully completed across all Health and Social Care Trusts (HSCTs) in Northern Ireland. All healthcare organisations and patients throughout the region now have access to a single, unified and current healthcare record, regardless of location. The first year of implementation exceeded expectations, delivering measurable improvements in care quality, operational efficiency, and cross-organisational collaboration.

Improve patient safety

By reducing clinical errors and ensuring accurate, accessible records.
Streamline workflows

To free up clinical time and reduce discharge delays.
Enable data-driven care

By integrating systems and surfacing actionable insights.
Enhance continuity of care

Across hospitals, community services, and social care settings.
Support transformation at scale

Overcoming the complexities of regional healthcare integration.

The solution

Single, unified healthcare

Infrastructure Transformation

Migrated legacy systems to a secure, scalable hosted environment, ensuring high availability and resilience across clinical and administrative functions.

Automation & Efficiency

Introduced process automation to streamline workflows, improving continuity of care and reducing duplication.

Unified Patient Record

A single, integrated health record accessible across hospitals, community services, and social care, enabling timely, data-driven decision-making.

Risk Mitigation

Applied enterprise-grade cyber security frameworks to protect sensitive patient data and ensure compliance with NHS governance standards.

Programme Excellence

Delivered through a dedicated health programme ethos focused on transparency, collaboration, and disciplined execution, ensuring delivery on time and within budget.

Data-Driven Insights

Leveraged accurate health care data to enable timely and targeted healthcare and clinical decisions by all HSCNI staff throughout the region.

What We Delivered

Telefónica Tech partnered with the encompass programme to deliver a fully hosted and managed service for the Epic electronic health record (EHR) platform, tailored to the needs of all five Health and Social Care Trusts in Northern Ireland. Our solution addressed the need for a consolidated single platform that was resilient and highly available, facilitating the integration and interfacing with dozens of ancillary systems. This ensured seamless data flow between Epic and downstream applications, supporting clinical and administrative workflows across the region. Our solution addressed the core challenges of fragmented systems, inconsistent records, and operational inefficiencies.

We provided end-to-end continuity, from initial architecture and infrastructure design through delivery and implementation to post–go-live optimisation and support.

This ensured the programme was delivered on time and within budget and successfully transitioned into a steady-state service in 2025.

The Epic roll-out has eliminated the majority of legacy systems and laid the groundwork for future innovation, with scalable architecture and delivery models that can be replicated across other regions. It also continues to support Northern Ireland on its transformative digital healthcare journey as the first Epic customer to manage care across all acute, community and social care settings.

Epic EPR Lifecycle Support Across All Trusts:

Delivered full lifecycle services for Epic Electronic Patient Records, including hosting, integration, and embedded L2 service desk operations.
Robust Infrastructure Deployment:

Delivered a resilient and highly available hosting platform with dozens of ancillary systems, ensuring secure and efficient data flow between Epic and downstream applications.
Governance & Operational Support:

Embedded governance overlays and bespoke workflows tailored to Trust-specific operational needs whilst ensuring compliance, including agile resolution of WAN uplinks, PKI discrepancies, and data centre access.
Service Desk Excellence:

Provided embedded L2 support teams handling thousands of incidents and service requests annually, with a stabilisation and optimisation roadmap in place for 2025.
Service Integration and Simplification:

Delivered streamlined integration between vFire and ServiceNow platforms, simplifying service management and enhancing operational efficiency across Trusts.

The Approach

Technology in Action: Scalable, Secure, and Resilient Epic Deployment

Telefónica Tech deployed the Epic application service onto its own proven Epic hosting reference architecture. This facilitates Active:Active data centre application delivery of the Epic presentation and web services tiers, with data tiers made available across data centres using inter-DC availability groups and mirroring.

This custom deployment architecture allows for all tiers of the Epic application to reside in both data centres at all times, and to be moved and operated from each data centre as the service requires ensuring ongoing availability targets.

Outside of normal Active:Active delivery, all tiers are routinely moved and delivered from singular data centres to test and prove ongoing application service failover capability linked to contractual Recovery Time Objectives, and to allow for application and service uptime when undergoing the monthly and zero-day cyber patching routines.

The Outcomes

Transforming Healthcare at Scale: Proven Outcomes and Measurable Impact Across Northern Ireland

Telefónica Tech was chosen for its proven expertise in managing complex healthcare transformations and its ability to deliver at scale. With a deep understanding of both public sector, and more importantly healthcare digital transformation delivery, Telefónica Tech partnered closely with clinical and administrative teams to ensure the successful delivery of a secure, scalable, and future-ready solution. Our collaborative approach and disciplined execution made us the trusted partner to bring the encompass vision to life.

Delivered on time and within budget: A major achievement for a programme of this scale, given the complexities of regional, multi-organisational digital transformation. The project spanned 24 hospitals, hundreds of sites, and involved the migration of over 85 million records.
Improved patient safety: Through unified records and reduced clinical risk, the programme has enhanced the accuracy and accessibility of patient data.
Risk mitigation: The programme has addressed long-standing risks associated with fragmented legacy systems, improving compliance, clinical governance and oversight, and achieving a data migration accuracy rate of 99.98%.
Positive regional impact: The programme is now in steady-state service and is seen as a model for national digital health transformation.
Demonstratable service improvements: Early indicators show operational efficiencies, reduced duplication, improved service delivery and the democratisation of data to the patient through the My Care app.

All 19 Milestones Delivered

Telefónica Tech successfully delivered all 19 contractual milestones for the encompass Hosting and Managed Service Transformation Programme, on time, within budget, and to the quality standards defined in the Architectural Overview Design.

Epic EPR Go-Live Across All Trusts

Enabled the successful deployment of Epic Electronic Patient Records across all five Health and Social Care Trusts in Northern Ireland (Nov 2023 - May 2025), supporting the regional vision of a unified digital care record.

Improved Clinical Safety and Workflow Efficiency

Early Trust reports indicated reduced clinical errors and improved patient safety, alongside demonstrable gains in workflow efficiency and reduced duplication.

What the customer said

“

"Through the encompass programme, we’ve achieved a landmark transformation in Northern Ireland’s healthcare — unifying patient records, improving safety, and enabling data-driven care across the region. This success was made possible by our partnership with Telefónica Tech, whose expertise and collaborative approach ensured delivery of this complex project on time and within budget. The impact is already clear: greater operational efficiency, reduced risk, and a better experience for both staff and patients. I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished together and excited about the future we’re shaping for digital healthcare. "

Fergus Wills

Senior Solutions Architect, encompass