Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein)
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355. To ask the Minister for Health the amount that has been spent on the roll-out of electronic health records to date; the spend by year to date in 2017; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [51676/17]

Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein)
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356. To ask the Minister for Health the way in which the pre-committed spend for the roll-out of electronic health records in future years, by year, until completely rolled out; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [51677/17]

Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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I propose to take Questions Nos. 355 and 356 together.

I presume by pre committed spend for the roll out of electronic health records in future years, that the Deputy is referring to the HSE’s plans for the phasing in of a national Electronic Health Record (EHR). The scale of the task to implement a national electronic health record programme is very large, challenging and requires a complex planning, approval and tendering process. In the business case, a 5 year and a 9 year technology investment programme is outlined but there is flexibility within its scope to stretch out timescales further. The total of all estimated costs including business change elements for a 5 year implementation are in the range of €647m to €875m respectively and the 9 year figure is between €609m to €824m.

The Electronic Health Record (EHR), as defined in the high level strategic business case, is a multi-annual programme of work and has 4 main elements - the Shared Care Record, the Community & Primary Care EHR, the Acute Operational EHR and the EHR integration suite. An acute EHR component is critical to the functioning of the New Children’s Hospital (NCH) and will be the first digital hospital in Ireland. Any capacity to fund future year requests is dependent on approval of the national EHR business case on the basis of a phased implementation consistent with the needs of the NCH. For a programme of this scale and scope, realistic timescales and funding options are important to ensure that the adoption of both the technology and the business change required by front line staff can be absorbed and managed in a coherent way. In addition to resourcing the EHR project with substantial manpower and financial resources, experience from other countries demonstrates that the vendor markets supplying many of these services needs to be carefully managed in terms of capacity and capability to deliver working tailored solutions in a satisfactory manner.

As regards progress to date, the HSE has appointed a programme manager to oversee the implementation of the Electronic Health Record in May 2017 and work is continuing with the HSE and my Department on progressing the business case with the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. The next phase of the EHR programme is to develop detailed business cases for each component, specification of requirements, procurement documentation and support during the procurement process. The HSE sought and received conditional sanction from my Department and the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform to undertake four tenders, utilising the Office of Government procurement framework, to provide them with external support for the programme. The 4 tenders are for the delivery of support for the following four areas: programme office; acute EHR; community EHR; and Shared Care Record and Integration.

The tender documents were published in August and the tender process closed mid-September. To date, one contract for this work has been awarded for the acute hospital EHR in view of the requirements for the National Children's Hospital. In the case of the other two lots, a re-tendering exercise is underway. The outputs from this work will allow greater clarity on the scope of the individual components for what is being procured and the detailed costings for each of the areas that will make up the electronic health care record. Only when this detailed work is completed can the procurement process be considered for submission to the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform and prioritisation assigned to the work. The work in relation to EHR will continue and feed into the implementation response to the Sláintecare report being prepared by my Department.

The EHR programme encompasses ICT infrastructure as well as a wide ranging series of digitisation projects such as MN-CMS, MedLIS and the core Patient Administration System. Regarding the expenditure on the EHR programme broken down by year to date, I have asked the Health Service Executive to provide the detailed information sought by the Deputy and I will forward this information to her as soon as it is available.