Jim O'Callaghan (Dublin Bay South, Fianna Fail)
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170. To ask the Minister for Health the estimated full-year cost of the full roll-out of electronic health records across the health service. [43297/24]

Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail)
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The ‘Digital for Care’ strategic framework published in 2024, sets out a clear ambition to put in place digital health records for all citizens in Ireland and proposed a 3 step approach for how these will be delivered.

By the end of the year the HSE will launch a Patient App that provides people with access to some of their health information and data that is already available. The functionality of the Patient App will be expanded over the course of 2025. Following the conclusion of a tender process currently underway, in 2025 the HSE will then start to build a national shared care record to collate patient data from digital systems in the acute and community healthcare sector. In parallel, the HSE has begun to plan for the third step that involves the delivery of enterprise Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems. This will be procured once but deployed on a regional basis given the scale and complexity involved, and will take on learnings from the HSE’s deployment of EHRs to date and from other justifications who are deploying or have recently deployed EHRs.

As the delivery of electronic health records is clearly a long term, multi-annual programme, actual costs will not be known until procurements are complete, however the Minister recently indicated that the deployment cost of enterprise EHR systems is likely to be between €250m and €300m per region. Separately the HSE will continue to invest in the underlying technical ICT infrastructure to support EHRs, all clinical and non-clinical systems, and continue to build cyber resilience, etc.