Creating a 'Paperless Nirvana'

Dublin Dental School and Hospital deploy MetaCompliance Policy Communicator - Creating a 'Paperless Nirvana'

Dublin 1st November 2005, The Dublin Dental School and Hospital has a heritage of over 100 years. As the largest dental education and training organisation in Ireland, the Dublin Dental School and Hospital has 650+ staff and students with responsibility for dental education, research and patient services. It consistently strives to implement and integrate innovative ICT healthcare solutions to gain advantage for their patients, students and staff.

The Dublin Dental School and Hospital (DDSH) recently implemented Baronscourt Technology's MetaCompliance Policy Communicator (MPC) software solution. One of the key drivers for installing the policy communication tool was the School and Hospital's strategic priority to become accredited to the Irish Health Services Accreditation Board and achieve compliance with ISO17799 Security Standard - a strategy dove-tailing with one of their holistic strategic goals of a "paperless environment".

"The objectives are to efficiently, effectively and securely address the information requirements of the DDSH in education, research and patient care and to provide a sound and "safe" foundation for the future which will pave the way to our ultimate goal, a 'paperless' dental school and hospital" said Luke Feeney, IS Manager of the DDSH. "We identified Baronscourt Technology's policy communicator tool as a solution to critically assist us in achieving accreditation and success in these three areas."

MPC directly contributes to the effectiveness of Information Systems security. A long-standing issue pertaining to security and compliance policies has often been the question of compliance communication management - how to ensure that all areas of an organisation take these policies seriously and how to manage policy compliance enterprise wide. MPC ensures that internal staff and students are made fully aware of how they should treat the organisation's information, enforcing receipt and reading of policies, testing understanding and acceptance and implementing rigorous application by making policy communication compelling and unavoidable.

Luke Feeney said, "MPC allows us to unequivocally communicate our policies and procedures through the flexibility inherent in the solution. Previous to MPC, we used email and our Intranet as a means of referencing our policies and procedures. This was not proving to be wholly effective nor reliant as not everyone may access to their email accounts on a timely basis plus there was no means of recording the policy acceptance or even that they had read and understood the message! MPC has been one of the key enabler in providing the DDSH with the capabilities to achieve accreditation with the Irish Health Services Accreditation Board and ISO17799 compliance."
MPC has been piloted with Salud, the DDSH's Clinical Information System, Outlook and Internet Explorer and has been successfully integrated with the Dental School and Hospital's Citrix Remote Access solution. Luke Feeney has said that there are more elaborate plans for the future of MPC. "We will also be integrating Moodle with MPC. Moodle is our web based open sourced e-learning/information management system. We envision MPC assisting in the management of compliance and communication simultaneously with Moodle.