Ireland's Lighthouse Projects bring technology into the care of chronic conditions like epilepsy, haemophilia, and bipolar disorder. The epilepsy strand is a joint effort between RCSI, the HSE, eHealth Ireland, Epilepsy Ireland, Beaumont Hospital, and Ergo — and it shows how much patients and clinicians alike stand to gain when health information moves onto digital rails.
Known as PISCES (Providing Individualised Services and Care in Epilepsy), the project set out to give the more than 40,000 people living with epilepsy in Ireland a more precise, proactive, and personal standard of care.
The Challenge
Before the project, there was no shared way for patients, clinicians, or researchers across Ireland to capture epilepsy-related medical information electronically. That gap made it hard to build a complete, consistent picture of a patient's condition — regardless of where in the country they were being treated.
The Solution
The team built an Electronic Patient Record (EPR) alongside a mobile-first, cloud-based Patient Portal App designed specifically around the needs of epilepsy patients. Wherever care is delivered, information can be captured, added to the patient's record, and pulled up again by the care team — no matter the location or setting.
A companion business-intelligence layer lets clinicians securely draw on aggregated, anonymized patient data to spot patterns and generate insights for the wider epilepsy community, helping shape both individual care and broader population health strategy.
For many patients, having a hand in recording and managing their own condition brings a real sense of independence — a way of feeling some control over an illness that, by its nature, resists being fully controlled.
With the EPR now in place, clinicians work from a single, nationwide source of truth for each patient's medical history. Genetic data is easier to interpret, and recording clinical decisions and follow-up actions has become far more straightforward.
Source: ErgoGroup.ie
