Ireland’s National Forensic Mental Health Service Goes Live with InterSystems TrakCare

InterSystems has announced that the National Forensic Mental Health Service (NFMHS) has gone live with the industry-leading healthcare information system, InterSystems TrakCare, to promote a safer, more timely, and efficient care service that will enable clinical staff to spend more time providing greater personalised care experiences for patients.

InterSystems TrakCare is a health information system and electronic medical record (EMR) for delivering and managing patient care across healthcare institutions. Used every day by hospitals, TrakCare manages more than 400+ million patient records across the globe.

For NFMHS, it delivers individualised care programmes for each patient, based upon their rehabilitation needs involving long-term multidisciplinary team co-ordination to ensure the best possible care and outcomes. TrakCare supports best clinical and therapeutic practice methods and quality standards as defined by legislation, the HSE and Mental Health Commission (MHC) to optimise and quantify patient outcomes using established performance measurement systems.

The service previously relied upon manual documentation in paper form. The enterprise-scale TrakCare EPR solution has enabled the NFMHS to become one of Ireland’s most digitally-advanced healthcare institutions.

Switching to TrakCare is delivering numerous benefits for the service to enhance patient care and improve patient outcomes. Clinicians now have access to a patient-centric and user-focused unified care record that provides a single view of the patient’s status and data.

Having access to critical information relating to treatment planning and progress, test results, risk assessments, legal documentation, observations, and medications is helping to improve patient safety and enhance decision making by providing the clinical team with access to real-time data across all areas of a patient’s care.

For example, the TrakCare solution provides an enterprise scale medication management solution that is helping to ensure that patient medications are appropriate, and the patient is receiving doses at the required times to closely manage their conditions and symptoms.

Where patients have co-morbid conditions, or risks, such as diabetes, TrakCare enables blood results and medication dosing to be intuitively visualised to correlate and adjust medication dosing where required. The new digital record also facilitates compliance with Mental Health Act reporting requirements in Ireland including the documentation and seamless sharing of required documentation among approved care providers and legal services.

InterSystems worked in partnership with the NFMHS team to ensure a clinical and cultural transformation, deploying a highly-skilled and experienced team to offer mentorship and guidance throughout the implementation.

Pat Bergin, Head of Service, NFMHS said: “The implementation of InterSystems TrakCare is fundamental in helping us to ensure we are consistently offering the best healthcare services to our patients. Leveraging it aligns with our commitment to excellence, enabling us to deliver even better care and enhance operational efficiency. It will reduce errors and increase clinical compliance. TrakCare’s real-time reporting capabilities will enable staff to monitor outcome measures, risk and incident management and legal compliance.

Chris Norton, managing director UK & Ireland, InterSystems, said: “It is a privilege to work with the NFMHS team. They have always shown a focused, dedicated, and ‘can do’ attitude, and are leading the way in becoming the most digitally advanced forensic mental health site not just in Ireland, but also across the globe. We are pleased to have supported them on their digitalisation journey and look forward to continuing the partnership in the future.”

Moving forwards, NFMHS is planning to use InterSystems TrakCare to support its Personal Community programme for patients nearing the end of their rehabilitation journey, who are either being introduced into independent living units, or back into the community. Personal Community draws on TrakCare to give carers access to patient information to help and assist this process, helping to connect patients who are moving out of the organisation (and their carers) with a record of care.