PloneGov: Health Atlas Ireland wins the Irish Public Service Excellence Award 2008

Health Atlas Ireland is an open source application developed to bring health related datasets, statistical tools and GIS together in a web environment to add value to existing health data. The application is part of the PloneGov project, an international Plone based egovernment collaborative initiative.

The Irish Prime Minister, Mr. Bertie Ahern, hosted a reception in St. Patrick's Hall, Dublin Castle on Friday April 18, 2008 at which he handed over the "Prime Minister Public Service Excellence Awards" to each of the 20 successful projects selected from this year's process.

The 20 Award winning projects were selected from among the 183 projects put forward for inclusion in the Awards process. The Chair of the awards Selection Committee, Professor Mary Daly and her colleagues had a very difficult task in selecting the winners, given the quality and diversity of the applications received overall.

Health Atlas Ireland was selected among dozens projects for its innovation capacity and its technical perfection. It is an innovative project that greatly improves the quality and the efficiency of services delivered by health services. Health Atlas Ireland is easily transferable to similar foreign authorities and its potential for replication is enormous. This project open the way to international software collaboration. The development of such software sharing initiatives helps underpin the sustainability of public services and makes a real difference now and into the future.

A fourth award for PloneGov

This new prize highlights one more time PloneGov avant-garde. The PloneGov initiative, started mid 2007, already won 3 other awards:

• Paris, Grand prix du Jury, Lutèce d'Or 2007
• Lisbon, Finalist, European e-Government Awards 2007
• Brussels, Good Practice label, e-Practice 2007

The "Prime Minister Public Service Excellence Awards 2008” outlines the outstanding quality achieved by the Irish PloneGov branch.

Health Atlas Ireland: the project

Health Atlas Ireland is an open source e-government project led by Irish Health Sector and supported by OpenApp, a Zea member SME, in charge of the technical development. It integrates geographical information technologies, database and statistical techniques. A user friendly interface supports web-enabled access across the Irish health sector and collaborating agencies. Health Atlas is a 'voyage of discovery' for health service planning and health event data analysis. The purpose of the system is to help answer questions related to health events, emergency response, health services and demographics, initially in the Republic of Ireland and eventually worldwide as related to Irish Health Services.

Contact persons:

• Howard Johnson - Health Intelligence (Ireland)
  
• Mel McIntyre - OpenApp (Ireland)