Billy Kelleher (Cork North Central, Fianna Fail)
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662. To ask the Minister for Health when the individual health identifiers register will be designed and built. [24090/16]

Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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In September 2015 the relevant provisions of the Health Identifiers Act 2014 to establish the Individual Health Identifier Register were commenced. These provide for the establishment of systems of identifiers for clients and for healthcare providers, both professionals and organisations. They also allow for Individual Health Identifiers to be assigned to individuals and to establish the related governance structure. Operational responsibility for the identifier system has been delegated to the HSE as provided for in the Act. The data to establish the register is leveraging the work that is ongoing in supporting the Public Services Card initiative by the Department of Social Protection. The register and supporting infrastructure has been designed and built and is currently being tested. The next step is to populate the register with live data. As the Health Identifiers Act is essentially a patient safety initiative to positively identify patients and clients it is important to ensure the validity of the data pertaining to each individual. It was anticipated that the register would have been in a full production environment by the end of Q2 2016 but there has been some slippage due to technical resource scheduling constraints and is now expected to be in place by end Q3 2016.