Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Social Democrats)
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244. To ask the Minister for Health his views on Children’s Health Ireland’s decision to use an electronic health system in the new children’s hospital which is not compatible with other hospital’s systems, including St. James’s; the engagements he has had with CHI on this matter; the expected timeline for establishing interoperability between this system and existing electronic health systems; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [9265/23]

Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail)
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The Electronic Health Record system chosen by Children's Health Ireland following an extensive open procurement process was selected based on the clinical and operational requirements of the new children's hospital, as the national specialty centre for the provision of paediatric care. Ensuring the requirements of clinicians, health care professionals and patients was the number one priority when choosing the EPIC electronic health record system for CHI. Whilst choosing EHR systems from different vendors does create challenges in terms of achieving interoperability, these challenges are not insurmountable and have already been addressed in hospital sites in the UK and elsewhere.

It is critical that all patients are transferred safely between different hospitals / healthcare settings and interoperability between EHR systems is just one component in the safe transfer of patients. The use of existing patient transfer protocols, that include the need for direct communication between medical teams, proper discharge notes (in electronic or paper format) and access to patient history, are equally important.

Whilst CHI has indicated that additional time may be required to implement interoperability between different EHR systems, nonetheless it is intended that other sites responsible for providing care to the same patients who are receiving care from CHI, will have access to the EHR system deployed at CHI, with appropriate read and write access to the patient record.

By choosing to deploy more than one EHR system, the health system avoids the risk of vendor lock-in and monopolistic behaviour. The need to avoid vendor lock-in is one of the key lessons that has been learnt by other countries, and subsequently shared with Ireland.

The delivery of an EHR in the New Children’s Hospital will support better management of health information, safer, better care, effective decision making and performance management, delivering substantial benefits to health services.