iPMS Go-Live National Orthopaedic Hospital Cappagh
IPM has recently been implemented in the National Orthopaedic Hospital Cappagh (NOHC), a Voluntary Hospital. The hospital was configured as a Facility on the DNE/RCSI instance of IPM.
NOHC is the national centre for elective orthopaedic surgery for adults and children from the age of 2 years old. It is the National Patient Referral Centre for Primary Bone and Soft Tissue Tumours, the Dedicated Centre for Elective Paediatric Orthopaedics under Children’s Health Ireland (CHI), the Dedicated Orthopaedic Oncology Surgical Centre for the National Sarcoma Service and home to the National Bone Bank.
There were many significant shortcomings in the previous system’s operational functionality and there was a system disconnect between the outpatient and inpatient episodic pathway that made it difficult to track patients who progress from outpatients through to surgery. The system was also out of support and running on old technology that needed to be replaced. Cappagh Patient Administration System. (CAPAS) was therefore deemed no longer fit for purpose.
NOHC chose to discontinue the use of their existing patient healthcare record number (MRN) as there were issues with the format of it, which included a hyphen. This involved full re-labelling for charts and full numbering with all third-party systems.
A small business and IT team worked under the direction of the Steering Group to analyse existing processes, examine data quality and then to define new business processes, a migration strategy, and an integration strategy. They also undertook testing, and training for the hospital staff.
On Friday 10th March, the CAPAS system was closed down and the migration files run overnight, to minimise downtime in the other hospitals in the group. Following the restoration of the system, integration was tested and backloading was complete to capture downtime activity, and other post implementation tasks were carried out.
On Monday 13th March as the hospital went back to full operation there were issues logged by users who were now adjusting to the changes in processes and procedures. This is expected after go-lives and members of the iPM National Team and Acute Operations provided on-site support for the go-live weekend and the following week, and off-site support until the initial transition was completed and the hospital went to normal support processes.
Benefits for Cappagh include alignment to the HSE eHealth Strategy to deliver existing national systems and a foundation for other national and local solution components.
The implementation of iPM in Cappagh brings them into line with 40 other hospitals who are also running iPM, leading to better standardisation overall.
Contact: iPMS Programme IPMS National Support IPMS.NationalSupport@hse.ie