IE
The HSE National Ambulance Service provides pre-hospital emergency care across Ireland, serving a vast geographic area through a highly dispersed mobile workforce. The Clinical Directorate is responsible for ensuring that paramedics and advanced paramedics have access to the latest clinical directives, policies, procedures, protocols, and guidelines (PPPGs) — often in challenging circumstances and at unsociable hours, regardless of network connectivity.
The service's primary requirement was a sensible repository for all manner of clinical information — predominantly clinical directives and associated PPPGs — that would be accessible to a highly dispersed mobile workforce at any hour, regardless of network state. This needed to be coupled with a push notification feed that allowed analytics around engagement, providing visibility into whether critical information was being read and acted upon.
Implementation proved very straightforward, with the system described as intuitive and clean. Benefits were apparent from day one — even the curiosity factor of launching the platform brought early adopters who quickly began requesting more content. The crisp, clean architecture of the Eolas app translated particularly well on mobile phone-sized devices, which was essential for a workforce that operates almost entirely in the field. The search feature proved effective, and the native PDF handler was noted as being close to optimised for mobile use.
The analytics capabilities proved especially valuable. Being able to see what users searched for provided a strong indicator of what content should be prioritised, and understanding engagement patterns enabled an increasingly effective offering. The single-platform approach — one location for all clinical information — was described as excellent. The variety of attachable formats proved particularly useful from a content management perspective, as did the ability to set expiry dates and unpublish content whilst retaining archived materials. The news feed function became a valued addition, allowing brief updates or flyers to be published alongside more comprehensive reference materials in folders — delivering key points directly into users' hands with additional depth available for those who needed it.
The utilisation of audit tools improved by 50% when hosted within the Eolas app, as they naturally became mobile and far more usable when so conveniently available. This represented a significant uplift in clinical governance activity driven purely by improved accessibility.
One early and significant success was the vast improvement in matching patient acuity to the most appropriate presenting facility. Ambulance crews operate across the six new structural areas of the HSE, navigating a diverse network of Local Injury Units, Emergency Departments, Medical Assessment Units, alternative care pathways, and various hospital capabilities — each with diverse and at times complex local access criteria. The ability to place all relevant PPPGs, clinical directives, and facility criteria in a single mobile repository, searchable intuitively, has significantly improved both patient safety and care quality.
Staff engagement with the platform was notably easy to achieve, and this engagement brought its own rewards as users discovered the breadth of resources available. Early feedback included suggestions for folder-level access controls within spaces and the ability to define whether users see certain folders — refinements aimed at creating an even cleaner user experience.
"The Eolas team have designed a good product designed about what its users want. It is clear that they are engaged and sincere in delivering the best. Quick responses are provided to any issues raised and features arrive and integrate without loss of function. I really do think that the personal touch isn't lost here and it is our intention to continue to work with Eolas and to promote Eolas where possible."
Clinical Directorate, HSE National Ambulance Service
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