News

Digital Health and Care Wales to move to cloud pathology platform

Digital Health and Care Wales (DHCW) is to implement InterSystems’ health information system and electronic medical record TrakCare Lab Enterprise as a fully hosted and managed platform across nine health boards, 13 hospitals and 23 laboratories in Wales, with the aim of improving efficiencies in pathology services and streamlining patient care.

The implementation comes as the next step of an “established partnership” between InterSystems, DHCW and NHS Wales, with NHS Wales having originally implemented the TrakCare Lab Solution over ten years ago. Building on this, it is hoped that TrakCare Lab Enterprise will support the establishment of an “all-Wales, fully standardised” pathology network service for laboratories across Wales, through which accessibility and data-sharing capabilities can be enhanced and “greater levels of interoperability” achieved.

Additionally, with the move to the new system, NHS Wales will reportedly benefit from a 24/7 support function along with the set-up, servicing and maintenance of the hosting infrastructure.

Colin Henderson, InterSystems’ country manager UK&I at InterSystems, comments: “Serving as a highly configurable solution for NHS Wales over the last 10 years, our InterSystems TrakCare Lab solution has proven itself to be a stable and reliable platform delivering efficiencies across the entire ecosystem; something they will continue to experience as they transition onto the new hosted TCLE platform. We are looking forward to continuing to support Wales on their transformation journey for many years to come.”

In February, we explored the draft organisational strategy 2024-2030 from DHCW, which sets out strategic objectives for digital across health and care, including infrastructure, data platform, open architecture, digital services, digital health and care records, research, innovation and workforce.

Last month we also looked into DHCW’s primary care strategy for 2024-2027, which highlights priorities including developing a digital futures team with the intention of shaping technology choices, and enhancing researching and reporting capability.

In other news from Wales, Promptly Health is reported to have secured an £11 million three-year contract to manage national patient-centred outcomes data for NHS Wales, following a procurement process which focused on assessment of capabilities around patient accessibility, innovativeness, data security and interoperability.