Children’s Health Ireland signs five-year deal with Sectra

Children’s Health Ireland (CHI) has signed a five-year contract with medical imaging and cyber security company Sectra.

A deal was signed in January 2025 following a four-month procurement, with the aim of saving healthcare teams time accessing diagnostic imaging and reports.

The technology provided will be deployed at the new children’s hospital in Dublin, which is currently under construction, and will provide care for children and young people who require specialised and complex care.

It will allow medical images to be consolidated into an accessible vendor neutral archive (VNA) and integrated with CHI’s electronic patient record (EPR), so that clinicians can easily access imaging and reports.

Dr Cliodhna Byrne O’Shea, applications programme manager in the Department of Digital Health at CHI, said: “Once implemented in our future children’s hospital, imaging technology provided by Sectra will be revolutionary for our professionals as they support Ireland’s youngest patients, and will be a key enabler of continuity of care.

“The VNA will mean that all non-radiology imaging and key related information will be catalogued correctly going forward and linked back to the patient record.

“New interoperability will be a game changer for clinicians, with connected imaging devices providing instantaneous access to imaging during clinics.

“This will save countless hours for our professionals, who will no longer need to walk across a hospital to find imaging stored on a device or hard drive.

“Additional specialist functionality will also help to move away from disparate systems in ways that will make life so much easier for our staff, allowing full control over worklists, ordering, and scheduling.”

CHI will have a single repository for all non-radiology digital imaging and communications in medicine (DICOM) images, reports and other diagnostic information.

A picture archiving and communication system (PACS) specifically for ophthalmology will also be deployed and will be configured to address discipline specific needs.

Parents will be able to securely send images and videos to healthcare professionals, for example footage of stutters and communication issues for review by speech and language therapists.

Jane Rendall, managing director for the UK and Ireland at Sectra, said: “Interoperable technology may be the requirement in this contract, but there will be a very human story to tell in its delivery.

“Healthcare professionals, patients, and their families will benefit from this initiative at CHI – an exemplar in Ireland’s healthcare digital transformation.

“This is an exciting initiative that expands Sectra’s footprint in Ireland, and we look forward to working with teams to ensure technology delivers against their workflows and needs.”

When the new children’s hospital opens, digital technology is planned to be involved in everything from electronic health records and the systems controlling the buildings, to automated pharmacy dispensing and the movement of supplies around the building by robots.

In July 2024, CHI announced that is working with data technology provider InterSystems to implement an interoperability platform at the new children’s hospital.

Healthcare IT supplier Ascom won a tender in June 2024 to implement its alert and notification management system at the hospital as part of a five-year partnership with CHI.