Tallaght University Hospital's (TUH) electronic patient record, developed in partnership with Belfast-headquartered digital technology company Kainos, has gone live.
Synergy, which is based on the Evolve Cloud platform, forms part of TUH's efforts to create a "hospital without walls" and ensure staff and patients have access to up-to-date patient information in the hospital and across its locations in the Tallaght community.
Healthcare staff can examine a patient's test results, medications, discharge summaries across multiple departments in a 'single view' using Synergy, and TUH said the system was "already delivering benefits to patients, clinicians and the hospital as a whole."
"Synergy has taken a number of different systems that struggled to integrate with each other, and streamlined the flow of information," Ciara Blair, EPR progamme manager and a former TUH occupational therapist, said.
"One colleague recently told me how they saved three hours when validating waiting lists, and how that freed them up to complete other tasks instead. Ultimately, this will benefit all patients of the hospital, whether they attend the main campus or any of our community locations."
In Association with
Kainos developed the Evolve platform to allow its clients in healthcare to adopt cloud-based solutions, aligning to the government public service IT strategy, with CEO Brendan Mooney saying it would most benefit patients.
"We have designed the system at TUH to be agile and operate according to what works best for the TUH team and their patients," he said.
"With more information and clearer data at their fingertips, staff are able to have improved care-related discussions directly with the patient. Removing the need to search and rely on paper records saves valuable time for healthcare workers, giving them more time to provide direct patient care.”
Synergy was rolled out in 2021 as TUH faced the challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic and the fallout from the cyberattack on the HSE. The hospital treats more than 300,000 patients annually, and said the programme would facilitate patient growth and expansion of services.
"Synergy addresses our requirements on many levels here in TUH - from improving workflow capability and interoperability of different clinical systems to enabling us to move on from older ICT, ensuring our patients receive the best care and our clinicians have a full holistic view of patients," Lucy Nugent, CEO of TUH, said
"We have also been able to reduce costs and our carbon footprint. We see this as the start of our journey and the long-term goal of facilitating home and community care using the system, in line with Sláintecare’s health transformational policy, and are keen to share our learnings with other healthcare providers in the country."
David Wall, the chief information officer at TUH, added that Synergy had enabled the hospital to integrate the IT systems it had invested on and "create new functionality" to capture patient data where paper was previously being used.
"We felt the approach made best use of our ICT investments, empowering us to prioritise programme change and manage the go live of Synergy with no operational disruption at a pace that suited our hospital," he added.
Welcoming the launch, Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly said: "A key component of Sláintecare is the delivery of streamlined care in the community. IT is a critical enabler of this transformative change.
"I look forward to further improvements such as this, as Ireland’s healthcare system takes full advantage of the opportunities presented by the rollout of new technology."
Photo: Paul Gannon, Senior Vice President of Business Development at Kainos (left); Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly and Ciara Blair, EPR Programme Manager at TUH. (Pic: Shane O’Neill, Coalesce)
