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‘Significant curtailment’ at Beaumont if legacy system not replaced

By Catherine Reilly - 07th Oct 2024

‘Significant curtailment’ at Beaumont if legacy system not replaced

A major outage of Beaumont Hospital’s legacy information system, or failure to replace it within the deadline, could cause “significant” service curtailment, warned a senior manager.

In correspondence to the Oireachtas public accounts committee (PAC) in April, the then interim CEO Mr David Sweeney stated that the replacement of the Beaumont Hospital Information System (BHIS) had been a key focus “for many years” in consultation with the HSE.

The BHIS is over 30 years old and will cease to function after 31 December 2025. As previously reported in the Medical Independent (MI), the potential failure of the system or any further delay in its replacement is considered a major risk to the operation of the hospital.

In July 2023, Beaumont secured funding of €4.6 million to staff the BHIS replacement project (Project Coral). According to Mr Sweeney’s correspondence, Project Coral was “an active project in Beaumont with nine different project streams all being led by senior executive sponsorship and senior project managers”.

Hospital management had begun “the process of developing a specific module of its business continuity plan for major incidents to include a segment for a BHIS system outage or IT replacement system unavailability”. This was being undertaken in conjunction with HSE management and other hospitals.

Due to the level of system integration required between Beaumont’s ICT systems, a new laboratory information management system had to be implemented before the other replacement components. The HSE stipulated that Beaumont adopt a national laboratory information system (MedLIS), but roll-out had been subject to significant delays over several years.

In August 2024, however, Beaumont became the first national site where MedLIS was implemented. Last month, a Beaumont spokesperson told MI the BHIS replacement project/Project Coral is scheduled to go live in quarter two of 2025.

“Business continuity plans are in place in each directorate in the hospital for BHIS outages. Electronic downtime solutions are also in place and tested monthly.” A wider business continuity plan was in development.

Meanwhile, Ms Anne Coyle has been appointed as Beaumont CEO. Ms Coyle was previously CEO of Mercy University Hospital in Cork.  Two interim appointments filled the position at Beaumont from January 2023 to 25 August 2024.

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