Client Story: with Joe Ryan of the HSE

This week’s episode of Project Management Paradise is a Cora Client Story with Joe Ryan from the Health Service Executive (HSE) Ireland.

The Health Service Executive also known as the HSE is the Government Agency that provides all public health and social care services in Ireland with over 100,000 people involved in the provision of these services. Joe is the Head of Program for Health Service Improvement and shares with us how Cora’s solution is used to help manage one of the biggest change management programs in the history of the state.

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Excerpts from Episode 33 – “Cora Client Story” with Joe Ryan of the HSE


It is a government agency that provides all public and social health care services in Ireland. These services range from hospital services to primary care, social care, those people with disabilities, and the elderly. They also provide mental health services throughout the country.


The program goal of HSE is simple: keeping people healthy and well. They provide access to high quality health care where and when it’s needed. They also improve efficiency in the delivery of those services, and making sure that the taxpayer is not only getting high quality services with good value for their money.


Too often, organizational change focuses on the organization and not about its customers and patients. This program is about is about taking health services and the delivery of those health services closer to the patient. We focus on putting the patient at the center of what we do.
We’re bringing together the services of social care, primary care, mental health and wellbeing, and delivering that at a very local level throughout the country and primary care networks. Also, redesigning how we deliver care and creating new models of care based on best international practice, and what is matched to the population need or Ireland.


Chronic disease management has improved. We’re trying to shift the management and treatment of those conditions closer to where patients live and work, including the primary care facility, general practitioner, and health nurse. Patients learn to manage their conditions. Equally the program is about teaching people to avoid developing these chronic diseases through better lifestyle decisions.


In the past, we relied on desktop type project management tools with no interpretability between those programs, which can be slow and unreliable. Now, we are bringing in multiple systems into a single network technology environment, not all of the organizations are HSC and therefore, they don’t have access to the same networks.


By going to a web based solution like the Cora System is, it has allowed us to bring all of the different stakeholders throughout the health family together and working on the programs as they need to do, and they have access to the same tools and information at the same time. We have management information from the reporting tools by the Cora System, which helps us make decisions and manage our risks and issues.


Getting people to come to and stay engaged in meetings. When people have good quality information and they’re able to update this information in a simple and straightforward way, that is much more inviting. You want to bring people that are key in leading these projects and improvements and make the environment as easy to work in as you can, so having that web based tool with the ability to manage your risks, issues, tasks, and benefits in one place has really been a huge step forward for us.


The Cora Solutions allows us to do that and link portfolios, projects, and tasks within a number of programs. The management information allows us to combine the information appropriate to the governance that’s actually looking at it, including the high level issues, decisions, and risks. The reporting tool allows us to layer that information appropriately, so we’re able to flag relevant information programs need in order to make the right decisions for the right people to efficiently use their time. The stakeholders and sponsors are more confident because of the increased visibility of the progress and risks that they can assess accordingly.


Cora is relevant to specific users, programs, and projects, and to develop the their project within the training environment itself.
The program is web based and accessible, the single version of the truth for all of our programs. We also get really good management information that configurable to our needs. It allows us to bring in the non-HSC part of the family into the programs effectively and easily.


“We chose Cora System because it met our needs and exceeded all of our requirements. Cora has very quickly understood the complexities of the health and social care world. They have invested themselves in working with us and providing us the best use of their products. They regularly stretch their capabilities and meet new demands.”

“When you’re trying to manage a complex set of projects and programs, it is the ideal tool. It’s also an ideal tool for a small single project that someone wants to do individually. We advocate within the system that they use the Cora System because it’s simple.”

Learn more about Cora Systems PPM Tool here.

Tune in to our most recent Project Management Paradise Podcast episodes available on Spotify and Apple.

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