Tallaght University Hospital New Electronic Patient Record is now live

The new Electronic Patient Record (EPR) system for Tallaght University Hospital (TUH), developed in partnership with digital technology company Kainos, has gone live for the first time. Synergy, based on the Evolve Cloud platform, furthers TUH’s strategic goal of creating a ‘hospital without walls’, ensuring all patients and staff have access to the latest patient information across the hospital and its multiple locations in the community.

Synergy provides healthcare staff with rapid, ‘single view’ access to examine and review a person’s test results, medications, discharge summaries and more across the multiple departments that can be involved in a patient’s healthcare journey. The system is already delivering benefits to patients, clinicians and the hospital as a whole.

Tallaght University Hospital sees and treats over 300,000 patients annually, with the new system having the capacity to facilitate the hospital as it grows and expands its services.

The roll-out of Synergy throughout 2021 continued despite the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic and the cyberattack on Ireland’s health infrastructure.

Minister for Health, Stephen Donnelly TD, has welcomed the development. He 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.”

EPR programme manager at Tallaght University Hospital Ciara Blair, a former occupational therapist at the Hospital, said, “Synergy has taken a number of different systems that struggled to integrate with each other and streamlined the flow of information. 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.”

The commencement of the new EPR system by Tallaght University Hospital represents the first phase of transformational change in clinical care. CEO of TUH, Lucy Nugent, said, “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 fully holistic view of patients.

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.”

Fran Thompson, HSE Chief Information Officer, said, “At the heart of Sláintecare is the development of a more population-based and integrated approach to service planning and care delivery which will facilitate the right care, in the right place, at the right time, by the right person. This investment in TUH will have positive implications for health outcomes, patient experience and health system sustainability for all the patients of the Hospital and surrounding area.”

David Wall, Chief Information Officer for TUH, added “The Synergy approach enabled us to integrate the ICT systems we have already invested in as well as create new functionality to capture patient data where the paper was being used previously. We felt the approach made the 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. All this was achieved by existing TUH staff working collaboratively with our suppliers and achieving the go-live despite COVID-19 and the cyberattack.”

Kainos developed the Evolve platform to enable customers to adopt cloud-based solutions in Healthcare, aligning to the Government Public Service ICT Strategy and adoption of cloud services.

CEO of Kainos Brendan Mooney says while this is a solution aimed at clinicians, those that benefit most are patients. He added, “We have designed the system at TUH to be agile and operate according to what works best for the TUH team and their patients. With more information and clearer data at their fingertips, staff can 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.”