Using Electronic Patient Records to Shape the Future of Epilepsy Care

Background

Electronic patient records are an important tool for storing and sharing patient data between healthcare professionals, helping to ensure more coordinated and effective care. Ireland has one of the richest collections of such records for people with epilepsy, through the National Epilepsy Electronic Patient Record (eEPR). Despite its scale and depth, this resource has been underused to inform service delivery, clinical practice, or national policy. Recognising the potential of the eEPR to transform care, researchers at FutureNeuro set out to demonstrate how it could be harnessed as the foundation for a learning health system in epilepsy — a system where routinely collected healthcare data is used to guide continuous improvements in patient outcomes. 

Research

The team developed a prototype clinical dashboard, called the EpiData Dashboard, using anonymised data from the eEPR spanning 15 years and over 6,000 patients. Designed in collaboration with clinicians, researchers, and data scientists, the dashboard brings together complex datasets into an accessible, interactive format, enabling group-level analysis of patient demographics, diagnoses, comorbidities, and  treatments. 

To showcase its capabilities, the researchers ran a proof-of-concept analysis on a pressing clinical safety issue: the prescription of sodium valproate to women of childbearing age. Sodium valproate is an effective anti-seizure medication, but it carries a known risk of birth defects if taken during pregnancy. The dashboard identified 144 women aged 16–45 who were currently prescribed the medication, with a quarter also having an intellectual disability. This example illustrates how such a tool can provide actionable insights that are difficult to obtain from individual patient records alone. 

Potential Impact

The dashboard is an important step towards building a learning health system for epilepsy care in Ireland. By enabling clinicians and policymakers to see patterns in patient populations, treatment use, and clinical outcomes, it offers a new way to support evidence-based decision-making, monitor safety priorities, and plan services more effectively. While the current version is a prototype based on a static dataset, it demonstrates the clear potential of Ireland’s eEPR to power more advanced, integrated systems that can continually refine and improve epilepsy care.