Laboratories play a central part in the delivery of health services by the Health Service Executive. They support critical services for diagnosis, treatment and monitoring of disease and programmes for screening for disease
There are c40 HSE funded diagnostic laboratories operating in Ireland. The Irish laboratory services is a quality services with a high level of compliance with accreditation standard ISO15189. Generally, laboratories have a paper-based ordering model and self-contained with little to no collaboration or partnership between sites. There are varying levels of automation and IT.
Many of our laboratory systems, whilst working adequately on each of the individual laboratory sites, work in silos. Most use legacy systems that have been in place for many years. The health service is frequently criticised for having thousands of systems that are not connected and ‘won’t talk to each other’. The National Imaging System 'NIMIS' that is now in place, ensures images and reports, regardless of where the tests took place, are now available to treating physician regardless of where they are treating their patient. In time, these test results will also become available directly to patients. MedLIS will provide the equivalent capability for laboratory services, supporting our ultimate objective of a single digital health record for all patients. Whilst an individual laboratory or clinical specialist may not see that direct benefit today, the patient and healthcare professionals of the future certainly will.
The MedLIS programme was initiated in 2015. Based on concerns related to escalating costs and rate of progress in, an independent report on MedLIS was commissioned by the HSE in 2018. The resulting report from Mazars provided a series of key recommendations and findings which were addressed prior to the first deployment of MedLIS to Beaumont Hospital. These included:
Strengthening the Implementation team structure and Leadership through the appointment of a dedicated Programme Manager and the Clinical Director.
Separating Quality and Test Management teams.
Simplifying the deployment model into a number of flagship hospitals to start the deployment. Beaumont hospital was selected as the first site/flagship (Cavan and Monaghan hospitals are currently being deployed).
Detailed project plans to be agreed with the sites and the vendor.
Project governance to be restructured e.g. this now takes account of the new Health Regions.
Significant efforts to ensure that hospital teams are incorporated into the design at the start of the programme deployment phase. This is now done.
Following this review, the programme was further delayed because of the pandemic in 2020, and the devastating impact of the criminally motivated ransomware attack on the public health service in May 2021.
MedLIS is now delivering. Following the successful implementation of MedLIS at Beaumont Hospital, it is planned to deploy MedLIS across all HSE-funded diagnostic laboratories by 2029/2030. Deployment will be managed through the Regional Health Areas and delivered via a series of (9) structured deployment waves. Each wave is governed by a defined set of milestones and gateway reviews to ensure quality and readiness.
Wave 1 at Cavan Monaghan has successfully completed the design, build and testing phases and is currently undertaking a final cycle of quality-focused validation in advance of a planned go-live on 21st March 2026. The hospital and supporting facilities have completed a hardware refresh, including the rollout of Wi-Fi enabled phlebotomy carts, handheld PDAs and printers, enabling paperless workflows.
Wave 2 at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, Drogheda, Louth County Hospital and Connolly Hospital, Blanchardstown is scheduled to complete the design and build phases by February, after which testing and validation will immediately commence. Go-live is planned for June 2026. A hardware refresh is currently underway at each site.
Wave 3 at Dublin Midlands sites and the project is scheduled for formal initiation in May 2026.
The capital cost of MedLIS to date is €28.6. This includes the establishment of the programme, development of the core build, ICT infrastructure and devices, external resources, deployment at the first site in Beaumont Hospital and work to date for deployments at Wave 1, 2 and 3 sites. Costs also include the impact of the cyberattack, that affected many of the systems hosted by the HSE at the time including MedLIS, and the cost of subsequently migrating MedLIS to a secure cloud hosting environment, prior to deployment at Beaumont.
Current expenditure covers items such as application Hosting, DR (disaster recovery), Application Maintenance and Support, Security and Audit Services, Licence costs etc, and is €4.1 to the end of 2025. These costs will increase by approximately €600k as additional sites going live on MedLIS in 2026.
