Mr. Damien McCallion:

The Digital for Care 2030 framework, which was developed with the Department, sets out a roadmap right up to 2030 for how we can invest in digital because we have a long way to go. We have stood up a number of major projects to advance it. One is the electronic health record. We have many electronic health records. I am familiar with the one the Cathaoirleach has referred to in south Dublin. We have them in our maternity hospitals, some mental health services and other hospitals. The issue is that they cannot all speak to each other and the staff that need to use those systems are typically in hospitals, not just in communities.

One system we have is consistent with other countries. We have looked at Alberta in Canada and at Northern Ireland, which is currently rolling out a system that will be finished in about three years. Some of the UK trusts are also combining. We have worked with them to develop a model around that. This will take time. In parallel with that, we are developing a health app for patients which will start to use what we already have. That will be launched at the end of this year. That will use MyGovID, which over 2 million people are already using, and will give people access to their medical cards, their EHICs and their long-term illness cards. It will also have the option to reimburse medicines, which will develop further over the next few years in terms of other medicines people may have. It will have an ability for people to enter their own. This will be helpful for family members caring for elderly people, like the gentleman that was mentioned earlier. It will also have signposting to services. Many people who come into the country do not know where to go. Those of us living in communities for a long time will know, but many do not. It is important to know where the services are and how they can be accessed. It will also have self-care capacity within it. We see this as being the key development with regard to giving patients access. When we talk about productivity, one of the areas we focused on initially in the first release was women who use maternity services. They will get their appointments directly to the app. We ran a pilot in the summer with about 60 women, and there was really positive feedback around that. We have an electronic health record in some of our maternity hospitals. In those that do not, we are standardising the data, to take a point that was mentioned earlier.

In addition to those big projects, we are also working on diagnostics. There is a national imaging system, bar two hospitals, whereby a child who appears in Letterkenny or Kerry and needs a neurological assessment can have that CT scan or MRI viewed in Beaumont hospital in Dublin. In times gone by, the inefficiencies that would have gone on to try to make that decision, apart from care outcomes, were huge. Beaumont hospital in north Dublin was the first site to go live with our new laboratory system in recent weeks. There were 3,000 people trained in eight weeks. One of the key aspects is electronic ordering for GPs.

There were between eight and ten people involved every day. There were 1,000 samples. I walked the floor with the team, the members of which would have had to enter all of that manually. That is now all electronically scanned and links into their robotic systems. There is a lot of potential on many of those big projects, and we will tender and work through a business case with the Department and the Department of Public Expenditure, NDP Delivery and Reform with regard to the roll-out of that.

We are obviously obliged to tender for the electronic health record. However, my point is that while the electronic health record is important, we can move in many of the other areas at the same time. I will not go on at length, but a great deal of work is going on with robotics and things like that. This is creating efficiencies. We had a robot built in the west last year that resulted in significant savings in the context of a load of administrative processes that are now run overnight. That means waiting list management is more accurate and it saves a couple of hundred hours in that one hospital. That is now being rolled out across the country. There is much scope there, but we need to be aware that we have procurement obligations. We will see companies or people say from time to time that we can use X and get there quicker. We have to follow our procurement rules. At the same time, many other things are happening. That is important. I would be confident that the framework gives us a good basis to move those things forward in a strategic and consistent way across the country.