Two Health and Social Care Trusts in Northern Ireland have gone live with Clinisys WinPath, at the start of a series of deployments from the Core LIMS project. This project, which is being led by the Business Services Organisation (BSO), will see every pathology service in Northern Ireland adopt the laboratory information system to support the modernisation of services.
Belfast Health and Social Care Trust (BHSCT) went live first with microbiology, blood sciences and biochemistry (including new-born screening, haematology and immunology) at the start of November, and South Eastern Health and Social Care Trust (SEHSCT) went live in the same disciplines three days later.
These large-scale implementations also had to be carefully aligned with other IT system go-lives within Northern Ireland’s ‘encompass’ programme, which has been set up to create a single, digital care record for every patient in the region.
Karen Bailey, Chief Executive of the BSO, said: “I wish to congratulate the Programme delivery team, our BSO supplier services and all our partners, especially those in the Trusts for the delivery of the two go-lives in such a short space of time. Digital health solutions such as the Core LIMS implementation will benefit patients across Northern Ireland for decades to come, and it is a proud moment for the Health and Social Care Service here.”
Historically, BHSCT was using an older Clinisys LIMS and SEHSCT was using a ‘green screen’ IT system developed by the BSO around 40 years ago.Both organisations have upgraded to the latest version of Clinisys WinPath, which is a modern, Windows-based system with features that will improve the efficiency and quality of testing services as staff become comfortable with new ways of working.
The LIMS go-lives are also tied into two further programmes of work to digitise and transform health and social care services in Northern Ireland. The first is the ‘encompass’ programme. The Northern Ireland Digital Identity Service for healthcare, which underpins a single, digital identity for every patient, a new electronic patient record, and a new imaging system, were also implemented at SEHSCT at the time of the LIMS go-live. Clinisys WinPath has been integrated with these systems and with 28 ‘downstream’ systems that need to display test results alongside other patient information.
The second connected programme is Health and Social Care Northern Ireland’s pathology transformation programme, which is working on a regional model for pathology services that will encourage standardised ways of working and provide better career paths to address workforce challenges.
Now the first go-lives have been delivered, work will be accelerated to deploy Clinisys WinPath into more specialisms, starting with cellular pathology next spring. The LIMS will also be rolled out across the Northern, Southern and Western health and social care trusts, and the Northern Ireland Blood Transfusion Service, while Northern Ireland’s Genomics Medicine Centre will become the first UK organisation to deploy Clinisys GLIMS Genomics.
Tony Oliver, programme director at Clinisys, concluded: “There was a huge amount of scrutiny on this project in the weeks leading up to the go-live, but on the day it went incredibly smoothly, and that was down to the huge amount of work that had been put in by laboratory and IT staff in the build and testing phases. We are already planning for the next go-lives early in 2024. When this project is complete, there will be a single patient record across Northern Ireland and a single LIMS.
“It is a hugely ambitious vision, but it will deliver enormous benefits to laboratories, clinicians and patients to have a modernised pathology service and a single source of the truth. Clinisys is looking forward to supporting HSCNI, the BSO, the trusts and the clinicians involved to deliver that vision.”