Trinity Affiliated Hospital Wins National Innovation Award
Posted on: 13 April 2011
The Adelaide and Meath Hospital, Dublin Incorporating the National Children’s Hospital at Tallaght (AMNCH) recently won the Public Service Category in the Irish Times InterTradeIreland Innovation Award. The award was granted for the development and implementation of a state-of-the-art electronic reporting system (TEAMS) that enables the production of electronic patient discharge summaries. This ensures high standards of care and efficiency within the hospital.
Development of the TEAMS system involved collaboration between Trinity College’s School of Medicine and the School of Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Sciences along with ERGO Software Group. The new content-rich patient information system aims to dramatically reduce the paperwork involved and reduce errors in prescriptions.
Commenting on the award, Professor of Surgery at Trinity’s School of Medicine and Consultant General Surgeon at the AMNCH, Professor Kevin Conlon, stated: “The Innovation Award brings recognition at the highest level for the pioneering work taking place at Trinity College Dublin and Tallaght Hospital. As a teaching Hospital of TCD we are leaders in the field of patient safety and in delivering a more patient centred service. We have demonstrated that the TEAMS system has broad impact on improvements in patient safety and business efficiency.”
In 2004, the Hospital’s paper-based discharge summary was replaced by an electronic discharge summary describing a patient’s diagnosis and procedures. While this was used throughout the hospital, it was not guaranteed to be accessible to community clinicians such as GPs and pharmacists. As the Hospital handles 25,000 in-patient discharges per year, the potential benefits of developing an electronic system were significant. The TEAMS system was implemented in the AMNCH in October 2010 and since its introduction has delivered significant improvements in the accuracy of information on patient medical records and brought greater efficiencies in billing and hospital administration.
The TEAMS system represents the first application in Ireland to provide medication reconciliation to GPs, community pharmacists and patients and gives individualised risk factor data for two major areas of public health: cardiac risk and paediatric obesity. There are also financial benefits to the system as no other product automatically pre-fills private health insurance forms and raises invoices, reducing turnaround.
More than 120 companies entered the Irish Times InterTradeIreland competition and 21 of these were shortlisted before the final winners were selected across the various categories. The shortlist was selected by an initial judging panel before the 21 entrants were invited to make presentations to a final judging panel last month.