Mr. Damien McCallion:

We focused on this in Digital for Care 2030. That is good, and there is increased investment. There are a couple of pieces to it. The first is that we are developing a national shared care record, which will go live in Waterford and Wexford next month. That will try to pull together some of the existing information that is in the heavy charts to try to make it available. For example, if something happened to me in Dublin and I lived in Sligo, the information would be available. We will gradually roll that out over the next couple of years. We will also expand the information that is available within it. This is one piece.

The other, bigger piece is around our electronic health record programme, in respect of which we have brought forward a preliminary business case. This is going through the approval process at the moment with the various Departments. We are hopeful that we will get it through in the next couple of months, which would then allow us to proceed to the prior information notice stage for tender for the project. In parallel, in view of the fact that this will take many years, as well as the shared care record, we are also putting in solutions into certain services. The Deputy mentioned Cork. If one went to the maternity hospital there, one would see a full electronic health record for staff. We are also allocating appointments to patients through the health app.

The three main legs include the app, which is live now. Hospital appointments were mentioned earlier. They are now available for patients via the app. We are seeing that grow every day. Second, there is the shared care record, which should build up a picture of the chart that we have at the moment . Third, there is the full electronic health record, which is to say we have a full-----