Carol Nolan (Laois-Offaly, Independent)
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1086. To ask the Minister for Health if progress is being made on introducing a laboratory information system and national individual health identifier within the HSE; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [19110/20]

Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail)
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The national laboratory system, MedLis, when fully implemented will ensure Irish healthcare providers have 24-hour access to complete and up-to-date accurate laboratory data across all sites and will improve the delivery of diagnostic laboratory medicine, healthcare quality, efficiency and outcomes for patients in the Irish healthcare system. Work on MedLIS is progressing but has been impacted as a result of resources being redeployed in response to Covid. The focus now is to deploy MEDLIS to Cavan General Hospital (and region) and use the learnings from that to inform subsequent deployments to other sites.

Progress is also underway in relation to the implementation of the Individual Health Identifier across national systems. The impact of not having national health identifies deployed across the Irish health system, including laboratories used for Covid testing became very apparent during the early weeks and months of the pandemic. We expect this will lead to a renewed sense of urgency to accelerate this project as the health service adjusts to the new normal.

To date the IHI has been seeded into eReferrals and a programme of work is underway to further deploy the IHI into GP practice management systems, iPMS Patient Administration System and a number of other national systems.

In light of service continuity and operational requirements in the context of Covid, further consideration needs to be given to the systems and operational sites that now need to be prioritised for IHI deployment, with a focus on Covid related priorities.