Dr. Susan O'Dwyer:

I will take that question. The Deputy is talking about access for patients to their electronic health records and for the healthcare professional, whether that is a hospital pharmacist, community pharmacist, GP or whoever it may be, to be able to access to a summary care record. A summary care record just details episodic periods of care. A medication list might be included, which would allow patients to see their own medication lists. It would also allow access for hospital pharmacists who are doing a medicines reconciliation or for community pharmacists, who need to know if things have changed when a patient comes out of hospital. If patients are seeing different providers, all the information would be in one place. That is important. To get to a place where there is an electronic health record, or even a national summary record, the building blocks need to be in place. One of the key building blocks is e-prescribing. We talk about the digital transfer of prescriptions, which we have at the moment, but we do not have e-prescribing. Under a proper e-prescribing system, the doctor would write a prescription which is coded. A code would be given to the patient so there is an identifier. There would also be a code for the drugs. There would be identifiers for those elements. That would then be transmitted to a national service, be it the cloud, if you want to describe it that way. It would be pushed to a national system. Patients could then go wherever they want. They would have free movement and could go to whatever pharmacy they want at whatever time. If the pharmacy they chose to go to initially was closed, they could go to another. They could go into that pharmacy and ask for their medication and their prescription to be filled. The pharmacist could then pull down that information, which would come into the system and be coded.

To go a step further, there would also be real-time eligibility if the system were linked to a national reimbursement system. All someone would ever need to see if a patient is eligible or approved for a certain medication would be the patient identifier and a medication identifier. That information would be linked into the national reimbursement system, which could tell the pharmacist in real time if a person is eligible. At the moment, there is a lot of red tape and administration needed to determine-----