Progress for Electronic Health Record

Current Update

We continue to focus on programme resourcing with Department of Health and the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform to ensure it is prioritised for funding later in 2017 and is established in budgetary systems from 2018 on for the duration of the investment phase. 

We welcome the recognition of the priority required for investment in this Programme in the Oireachtas Committee on the Future of Healthcare Sláintecare Report. For example it identifies that there should be "Continued strong support of the e-health strategy - particularly ensuring the necessary funding for timely roll-out of the EHR system". The report is available here. 

Electronic Health Record Programme Development Background

During the latter part of 2014, the HSE engaged with over 150 eHealth industry vendors through an event at Croke Park and held some more detailed discussions with large System Integrators and vendors.

The overall purpose of this engagement was to gain insight into the capabilities of EHR vendors across the range of solutions and services required to deliver a national EHR, and also vendors’ preferences and recommendations for implementation, procurement and commercial approaches.  A set of assumptions was defined, including an overall eHealth Blueprint focusing on the core components of an EHR, the indicative intent of the HSE and considerations around the implementation programme, and these were communicated with vendors in advance of individual sessions.

The engagement was also intended to test the validity of the eHealth Blueprint with respect to what could be provided by the market, and to understand rough order of magnitude estimates of the cost of implementing core components of the national EHR.

Vendor Consultation

HSE Vendor Package A vendor package for Vendors who participated in Vendor Briefings

Webinar EHR Briefing for Suppliers  Recording of HSE Webinar to brief vendors on the EHR programme (or viewable directly below):

Our findings so far are that we have good building blocks on which to add other core components of an EHR. These include a National Imaging system (NIMIS), and programmes underway include an EPR for Maternal and Newborn and a Labs system. There are some therapeutic EPRs already well developed, including for Epilepsy. 

This is reflected in the following architecture:

EHR Architecture Link to download the National eHealth Blueprint

EHR Business Case

Arising from this work we published our Vision Direction document  which sets out the overall context and parameters for the programme.

We have now finalised a Business Case which was approved by the HSE Leadership team in the spring of 2016 as an appropriate case to be made. The document has also been reviewed by the council of Chief Clinical Information Officers and the eHealth Ireland committee.

In March 2017 the eHealth Ireland committee asked that consideration be given to the publication of the business case to enable public comment to be made on its content. The newly formed Electronic Health Record steering group approved the version below as an appropriate version of the business case to be published.

The business case is published here in the interests of transparency, the eHealth Ireland team would welcome thoughts and comments on this document over the coming weeks. Please get in touch via the contact process on this web site.    

You can see all relevant files below.