Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

It just reflects that a large amount of money was allocated and that a large amount of money has been spent. The number went up quite a lot for this year. It will go up again substantially for next year, partly in response to the cyberattack to increase security and patient information protections, and partly because we need a fundamentally different infrastructure to bring all the patient information together to create the electronic patient records. There is a separate piece around operational information, to which the Deputy referred, such as how many patients are being seen in any given hospital on any given day, how many patients are going through theatres or how many are being seen in outpatient services. A great deal of work has been done on that and the HSE now has sight of a lot of that operational detail. There is a lot more that needs to be done but the big win will be electronic patient records. In pretty much every hospital I go to, the clinicians say one of the most frustrating things about their jobs is the inability to access-----