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Date posted
19 June 2024
Reading time
4 minutes

Digital Transformation Journey in an Acute Teaching Hospital: Leveraging Evolve Cloud for Seamless Healthcare

An acute teaching hospital in Ireland 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 the hospital’s strategic goal of creating a ‘hospital without walls,’ ensuring seamless access to patient information across various locations.

Challenge:

Initially, the hospital focused on addressing the challenge of modernising its healthcare delivery by replacing key legacy systems. Clinicians needed seamless access to federated data from various hospital systems, including patient demographics, attendances, clinical letters, and digital discharge summaries. Building on this success, the hospital is now tackling the challenge of transitioning from paper-based processes to streamlined inpatient digital pathways.

 

Solution:

The Synergy 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, such as Lambda, SQS, RDS, and S3, and utilises modern DevOps methodologies to ensure environmental consistency and maximise solution availability.

In anticipation of the expected growth in usage of the Synergy solution and to futureproof the hospital, key improvements have been implemented:

  • 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, improving 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. Additionally, 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.