Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Okay. I do not know if this is within the Minister of State's remit. One of the things I hear again and again when it comes to e-government is the lack of digitisation in the health service and the consequent fragmentation of information relating to patients, because things are not joined up. I hear story after story of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, where there may be complex treatments or multiple issues across different demarcation lines of several consultants. They are all in different silos and information is not easily available so that people can see the holistic picture of a patient. This negatively impacts on patient care. It seems like a no-brainer - and people have been saying it for a long time - that we need to rapidly advance the digitisation of patient information. Where are we at in this regard and why is it taking so long?

Connected to that, to what extent is the fact that our health service itself is massively fragmented an obstacle? In other words, we have the the St. Vincent's Healthcare Group, the Bon Secours and the HSE running another bit. There is all this fragmentation and private bits of the health service which potentially create demarcation lines and silos which are unhelpful when we need a streamlined, coherent, non-fragmented health system where information can flow easily with the patient.