David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

To be honest, I am not at all comforted by the response in terms of how quickly we will get to a solution on electronic health records. There is not the urgency that needs to be there and whatever happened over the last seven years was unacceptable.

Would Mr. O'Connor accept, because he is responsible for analytics, that information sharing in terms of patient information flow is important and that it is an important part of this Bill but data from patient activity, it is also important for the running of the health service? Data is gold dust for healthcare professionals.

Would Mr. O'Connor accept as well that there are weaknesses and gaps in providing data? It is frustrating when we table parliamentary questions and we cannot get access to information. Here are a couple of examples. I asked the Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth the number of children on disability service waiting lists for children's disability network teams and the response was that the information is not collated on the average time on waiting lists and some individual children's disability network teams, CDNTs, indicate they do not have a separate system in place to capture this level of activity. I asked the Minister the number of people on disability service waiting lists for each service type, excluding children's disability network teams and the response was that there are no centrally-maintained waiting lists for these service. I asked the Minister the level of outstanding inpatient charges owed to the health service and the number of patients this relates to and the response was that the Minister regretted to inform me that the information on the number of patients with outstanding debts is neither centrally recorded nor readily available. I have loads more. Much of it is fairly basic data as well. If we cannot capture data, if our systems are not connected and if they systems do not interconnect, we do not have interoperability.

The Department is bringing forward a Bill that will be fairly worthless unless we invest in the information technology. We do not have a centralised financial system. We do not have systems that speak to each other. Mr. O'Connor is talking about a black hole in the private sector. I have to put it to him that the health service, in addressing information deficits, electronic health records, e-health, collecting data and having centralised systems that can speak to each other, is light years behind where it needs to be. Unless we solve that problem, I am afraid this Bill, worthy as it is, will not be able to do what it needs to do.