Mr. Damien McCallion:

I will make a couple points. There are two levels to this. One is having electronic records within services – community and hospital. The policy we worked on with the Department in the past couple of months as part of the framework is to have an integrated record in the context of the new region so it is community and hospital together where possible. There will not be a solution that will work for everything. There will also be what we call niche solutions for things such as disability or some of the home care areas. There will always be other solutions that need to be developed alongside that. We are now working and putting together the tender for the overall EHR. Separate to that, there is what we call the shared care record, which is where we draw the information from all the individual systems. General practice is probably the most developed. We are currently out for tender for that. We are in what is called the competitive dialogue process for that solution with a plan to implement it in 2025. Looking at it from the top down, the app is the mechanism where the patient will see some of the information in the system.

The shared care record is like a window into all of the systems on the ground. For the electronic healthcare record, which we are going to tender on, we are currently working up the business case and specifications and looking for a joint-----