Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 30 November 2016
Select Committee on the Future of Healthcare
Health Service Reform: HSE
9:00 am
Mr. Tony O'Brien:
Reference was made to health records. Ireland is really late to the party on joined-up health records. A decade of not just underinvestment but pretty much no investment in some of our platform systems has resulted in that. As in some other spaces, however, that means we are not in the difficult position of having to rip out recently invested systems. We do not have that legacy systems problem. Two weeks ago I signed the memorandum of agreement with the Department of Social Protection which will allow us to roll out the individual health identifier. This will be rolled out in 2018. The electronic health record business case is under consideration. This will be quite transformative in terms of the systems base which will overcome whatever residual deficiencies in structures there will be at any stage in the future because there will always be some individual-----