The long-awaited national laboratory information management system (MedLIS) has gone live at the first site, Pulse+IT has learned.

After a delay of almost five years, the system is now live at Dublin’s Beaumont Hospital and efforts are already underway to expand the service to additional sites.

The implementation of MedLIS has been hit with several challenges since the original contract was signed with Cerner (now Oracle Health) in 2015.

The project was impacted by both the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2021 cyberattack on the HSE. The MedLIS program was temporarily suspended in May that year following the cyberattack while the project team was re-directed to support the acute and immediate response to the attack.

According to the HSE, the MedLIS server environment and infrastructure was also impacted by the events of May 14 2021 and a decision was made to rebuild and host the application remotely in Sweden.

The rebuild in Sweden was completed in March 2023 and has facilitated “a code upgrade to the latest supported version, alignment with a cloud-first policy, and a more robust disaster recovery environment”.

The HSE has confirmed to Pulse+IT that the system has gone live at Beaumont Hospital. Electronic GP ordering has also gone live in Navan and, according to the executive, is “working very successfully”.

The project team is currently engaging with additional sites in relation to further deployment, including University Hospital Waterford and Galway University Hospital.

GPs will be able to place lab orders from within their practice management systems through a link on the Healthlink portal. The most frequently ordered tests are listed first.

The national roll-out of MedLIS is expected to take several years, a spokesperson for the HSE said.

“Deploying laboratory systems is complex and takes considerable time and effort at each acute site. Each site takes between six and nine months to complete the implementation and accreditation process. The HSE intends to run a number of these projects in parallel.

“We are in discussions with the vendor to better understand their capacity to manage multiple hospitals at the same time. It will take a number of years to roll out the system to all public hospital sites. Deployment timings will take into account service needs and health service priorities at the deployment sites.”

When complete, the MedLIS project will establish an integrated nationwide laboratory information system that will facilitate access to a patient’s complete laboratory diagnostic data. Clinicians and other healthcare providers will have access to the full laboratory information for each patient on a 24/7 basis.