Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 1 February 2024

Public Accounts Committee

Appropriation Accounts 2022
Vote 38 - Health
Report on the Accounts of the Public Services 2022
Chapter 18 - Health Service Executive Funding and Financial Reporting

9:30 am

Mr. Derek Tierney:

It is well understood and well known that rolling out EHR is very complex. It is very complex technically based on our existing infrastructure and these are large systems. Funding allocation is another contributor in terms of how fast we can go and ultimately the capacity of the system to absorb change is another key factor. We are pushing hard on the maternity roll-out and, as I said, our hope is that by the end of this year, 70% of all live births will be captured and we will progress beyond that. That is competing in a very wide demand for other IT solutions right across the service, whether they are other clinical systems, back-office systems, community systems which we actually have to turn a focus to because our digital maturity in our community landscape is very, very immature and we need to progress on that.