Ms Eilísh Hardiman:

The Deputy is right that the maternity hospitals are rolling out a system currently and I believe that four of those 19 hospitals have electronic records in place. As with any electronic healthcare record implementation and management, it is important that the systems are able to interface with each other. In this procurement, one of the requirements we have for the vendor, when selected, is that it will have to demonstrate it can take information from other sources. No matter which system is put in there will always be some information that will have to transferred between systems. As part of the current scope, and of the design and implementation when we get to that, we will actually work through that with whatever systems that need to feed into the electronic healthcare records. This will be taken on board as part of the design and implementation.