James Reilly (Dublin North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

We are back to the core point. The IHI is simply a method of identification, nothing else. Health service providers can access the IHI register to give a person his or her IHI. The full value of the new system will be reached when we have e-health rolled out right across the system in a coherent and connected fashion, which is not the case at the moment. I was horrified to learn that not only were there 11 different systems in place under the former health boards which could not talk to each other, but something like 1,700 different software packages were in use throughout the system at one point.