A new electronic patient record system has gone live for the first time in one of the country’s busiest hospitals.

Tallaght University Hospital (TUH) treats over 300,000 patients per year. The new system, 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.

“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,” commented the system’s programme manager at TUH, Ciara Blair.

According to the hospital’s CEO, Lucy Nugent, Synergy has improved the workflow capability of the hospital and enabled it to move on from older IT systems.

“This ensures our patients receive the best care and our clinicians have a full holistic view of patients. We have also been able to reduce costs and our carbon footprint and we are keen to share our learnings with other healthcare providers in the country,” Ms Nugent said.

The new system, which is based on the Evolve Cloud platform, was developed in partnership with digital technology company, Kainos.

“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 paper was being used previously. All this was achieved by existing TUH staff working collaboratively with our suppliers and achieving the go-live despite Covid-19 and the cyber attack,” explained TUH chief information officer, David Wall.

TUH added that the new system also has the capacity to facilitate the hospital as it grows and expands its services.