News

Following a thorough accreditation process the National General Practice Information Technology (GPIT) Group has confirmed that Socrates has again been accredited as part of their 2022 accreditation process.

The GPIT Group comprises representatives from the Irish College of General Practitioners, the Health Service Executive (HSE) and the Department of Health. The aim of the GPIT Group is to promote the eHealth agenda in Ireland, in particular electronic communications and interoperability between GP and health service information systems. Certification of general practice software systems previously occurred in 1999, 2003, 2008, 2014 and 2018 and the Socrates system has been certified in each of these previous reviews.

The GPIT run the certification process in order to:
• ensures that practice management systems support the requirements of general practice.
• help to coordinate the development of general practice systems with developments in health service information systems.
• promote interoperability between general practice systems and HSE systems.
• provide a roadmap for further development of the electronic health record.

The certification process involved a vendor self-assessment of their product and services against the certification test plan. Representatives of the GPIT then tested each system to ensure conformance with their requirements.

Speaking about the accreditation, Clanwilliam Health Managing Director, Eileen Byrne said: “The GPIT Accreditation is incredibly important to both our systems and our business. It effectively acts as a seal of approval from our key stakeholders and shows the value that Socrates adds to our customers on a daily basis. As a business, we take pride in the ongoing development of our systems to ensure that they continue to provide the strongest digital foundation for our users while at the same time facilitating interoperability between GP and HSE systems.

Since the last accreditation round in 2018 Socrates has evolved and been augmented to assist GPs with key HSE initiatives such as Chronic Disease Management (CDM), the Individual Health Identifier (IHI), Covid Vaccines, e-referrals, e-prescriptions and much more. We are very excited about what the future holds and are focussed on continuing to add value-adding functionality to our systems for both users and healthcare industry stakeholders alike.”