Written answers

Thursday, 26 October 2017

Department of Health

Hospital Facilities

Photo of Róisín ShortallRóisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Social Democrats)
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208. To ask the Minister for Health the costs associated with the upgrade of hospital systems to facilitate the MedLIS project for 2016 and to date in 2017; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [45619/17]

Photo of Róisín ShortallRóisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Social Democrats)
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209. To ask the Minister for Health the reason for the delay in the roll-out of the national MedLIS project in view of the HSE's claim that the delay was due to the need to accommodate changes that are required for the system to work in the right way for the health care system; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [45620/17]

Photo of Simon HarrisSimon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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I propose to take Questions Nos. 208 and 209 together.

MedLIS is a multi layered programme which impacts on the core Laboratory Service and on those healthcare staff who utilise the Laboratory Service namely General Practitioners, Acute Hospital staff and a number of Community Nursing Homes. It is a clinically led change programme which is technology enabled. It is intended that it will improve the delivery of diagnostic laboratory medicine, healthcare quality, efficiency and outcomes for patients in the Irish healthcare system. The existing laboratory systems, as with all digital systems, constantly require upgrading and maintenance. A number of currently deployed laboratory systems required hardware, operating system and database upgrades in 2014 and 2015 to ensure that they would operate safely and be supported by the vendors of the system. These laboratory systems were deployed in the 1990’s and have been upgraded several times in that time frame. The costs of these upgrades, which were mandatory, are as follows:

CountyUpgrade Cost
Galway€115,325
Cork€394,990
Limerick€494,696
Navan€238,553
Waterford€418,618

The strategic goal for the MedLIS Project is to ensure Irish healthcare providers have 24-hour access to complete and up-to-date accurate laboratory data across all sites. The project will replace all of the laboratory systems throughout the country and is being supported by technology teams from the HSE.

To achieve this goal, the HSE undertook a public procurement process for the supply of a national laboratory solution and Cerner Inc. were the successful bidders. The contract is a fixed price contract for the delivery of the Cerner solution replacing all the existing systems in the 43 HSE and Voluntary Laboratories with the Cerner Millennium system. All laboratory disciplines will be replaced including Biochemistry, Immunology, Endocrinology, Haematology, Microbiology, Virology, Histopathology, Cytopathology, Autopsy services, Blood Transfusion, Histocompatibility & Immunogenetics (tissue typing) and Molecular Diagnostics. It will also provide for the delivery of functional interfaces to multiple external systems, e.g., Order Communications Results Reporting, Patient Administration Systems, Healthlink and other national clinical systems, e.g., National Renal System.

Such a complex change programme has taken longer to design, test and implement than originally planned by both the HSE and Cerner. However, as the contract is a fixed price delivery contract the HSE does not incur any additional supplier costs due to schedule adjustments. The MedLIS project is primarily about patient safety and quality improvement of services being provided by the Laboratory Service. As such it is critically important that the solution is delivered in accordance with the workflows designed to the Irish Laboratory requirements. Schedule adjustments made now are done to ensure that the project will be fit for purpose, underpinning patient safety at all times and delivering a solution that is functionally beneficial for the Laboratory Service. The project is currently being closely monitored by the HSE project steering group and is on schedule to 'go-live' in St. James Hospital in Q2 2018.

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