Northern Ireland’s blood transfusion service goes live with Clinisys WinPath
- 18 June 2024
Northern Ireland’s blood transfusion service has migrated from its 15-year-old laboratory information system to Clinisys WinPath, with the aim of creating a single technology platform.
The go-live on 3 June 2024, is the latest milestone to be achieved by the CoreLIMS programme, which was set up to support the Health and Social Care Northern Ireland pathology transformation programme.
The project is working to combine the seven information systems used by Northern Irish laboratories, to a single platform system across the health trusts and the blood transfusion service.
In a press release published in June 2024, Robin Bell, programme manager at Clinisys, said that the go-live at the Northern Ireland Blood Transfusion Service is “an important milestone”.
“This is the first national system that we have deployed with WinPath and it keeps up momentum on the CoreLIMS project.
“It will deliver significant benefits to the blood transfusion service, which plays such a vital role in healthcare across Northern Ireland,” Bell said.
Clinisys WinPath is planned to be deployed at the laboratories at the five health and social care trusts in Northern Ireland, as well as the blood transfusion service, and the country’s Genomics Medicines Centre.
This is intended to unify the sending and accepting of blood and blood component requests, reducing the need to transfer information from one IT system to another.
The CoreLIMS programme will continue to be rolled out until 2025 and will integrate with other significant tech projects in the country, to create a single, integrated electronic care record for every Northern Ireland resident, with patients being able to access it through a portal.
Clinisys was awarded the contract for the laboratory information system in 2021.
Belfast and South Eastern Health and Social Care Trusts migrated their microbiology, blood sciences and new-born screening in November 2023.
In June 2024, Belfast Health and Social Care Trust announced that it had gone live with the encompass digital record system, replacing paper processes with a single digital record for each patient.
