Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 7 July 2021

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health

National Children's Hospital: Discussion

Ms Eilísh Hardiman:

We did look at that and it is highly complicated because those children's units in the regional hospitals - not just Cork, Limerick and Galway, there are 19 hospitals - are very embedded in their existing hospitals. It is hard to implement a full electronic healthcare record in just a ward in a whole hospital. That would be extremely challenging to implement. We had hoped to be part of one system but that was going to take too long to deliver to meet our deadline. We anticipate that the best way of addressing this is to be able to interface with other electronic healthcare systems and to incorporate a paper-based system that can transfer data, and we always need to do this anyway. If one looks at the big electronic healthcare-----