Mr. Muiris O'Connor:

-----will assign its own medical record number to the patient. I have reasonable confidence that if someone returns to a hospital, such as St. James' Hospital, he or she will remain with that medical record number for the hospital. However, if the patient goes to Beaumont Hospital the next week, Beaumont Hospital will generate a new medical record number. The HSE, with its identity management service, is chasing those numbers down, looking at the individual hospital records and assigning an IHI, whereby we know it is the same individual in both cases. However, that is laborious and time consuming and the cases do not always get connected.