The timeframe for delivery of the National Electronic Health Record has many dependencies including sanction through the infrastructure gates set in place to manage investment programmes of this scale, a series of successful procurements and agreement on associated contracts, investment, resources and technical capacity to deliver. All of these are being addressed in a structured and urgent manner.
Patient portals are a mechanism to provide patients with access to a range of digital services, information and in some cases patient data itself. To date, the state has invested in EHR systems at a number of sites including St James Hospital in Dublin. There is a proposal under consideration in relation to enabling a patient portal at St James but there are also considerations in relation to how we make these capabilities available to patients and citizens more generally. One such consideration is whether it is fair and reasonable to have a different portal for every health facility so that people have to have a separate login and password for every hospital/ portal they are given access to. We expect portal access for parents of children at the new children's hospital will be especially popular. There are also commercial considerations in terms of how the state wants to fund such initiatives and how best to avoid duplication of costs etc.. Nonetheless we are mindful of the benefits that such portal can provide and the opportunity of being able to do this relatively quickly compared to the possible timing of the national health record. The HSE Health App and National Shared Care Record are relevant in this regard..
