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Date posted
15 October 2024
Reading time
4 minutes

Tallaght University Hospital’s Digital Transformation Journey

Overview

Tallaght University Hospital (TUH), one of Ireland’s largest acute teaching hospitals, has made significant strides in digital healthcare by implementing the Evolve Cloud platform as its Electronic Patient Record (EPR) system, named ‘Synergy’. The Evolve platform aligns with TUH’s strategic goal of creating a ‘hospital without walls’, ensuring seamless access to patient information across various locations.

Challenge

Initially TUH focussed on addressing the challenge of modernising its healthcare delivery by replacing key legacy systems and providing clinicians with seamless access to federated data from a range of different hospital systems including patient demographics and attendances, clinical letters, and digital discharge summaries.

Building on this success, the hospital is now tackling the challenge of transitioning from cumbersome paper-based processes to streamlined inpatient digital pathways.

Solution

The Evolve solution is hosted in AWS and includes a modern HTML5 clinical portal, Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) clinical repository, forms designer and Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) workflow designer. It takes advantage of multiple AWS cloud services including Lambda, SQS, RDS, S3 and utilises modern DevOps methodologies to ensure environmental consistency and to maximise solution availability.

In anticipation of the expected growth in usage of the Evolve solution and to futureproof the hospital, Kainos identified, architected and delivered a series of key improvements. These will allow the solution to be more easily monitored, scaled and maintained going forward.

In the past year, the following enhancements have been added:

  • Dockerisation: EC2-hosted applications have been containerised and are now hosted on ECS, resulting in simplified build steps, faster build times, more straightforward release procedures and faster auto-scaling of the live service.
  • Logging: The logging services have been consolidated into a centralised service using CloudWatch, reducing overheads, providing a single source of truth, and enabling more flexible alerting capabilities.
  • Security: The solution now uses AWS Inspector alerting, AWS Config and GuardDuty to implement a range of enhanced security notifications which has improved the project team’s preparedness and ability to respond rapidly to new security issues.

Benefits

The new system has consolidated technology and knowledge, eliminating the security risks presented by the legacy systems and improving clinical safety by bringing previously siloed information into a single clinician portal.

The recent ECS Docker-based containerised enhancements have improved operational efficiency, allowing Kainos to test development enhancements rapidly while providing increased service robustness.

Highlights

  • The transition to ECS has reduced build and deployment times significantly.
  • CloudWatch now serves as the central source for log analysis, offering rich dashboard capabilities and reliable alerting.
  • Security measures have been bolstered with real-time vulnerability reporting and enhanced notification systems.