€225m digital record system will ‘help reduce patient errors’ in hospitals

Hospital patients’ records are to be stored on a new €225m digital system which is to be rolled out across the country.

The European Investment Bank (EIB) has provided funding for an eHealth programme which is a key recommendation of the Sláintecare report.

Health Minister Simon Harris said: “If you want to have integrated healthcare you need to use technology to make that happen. We need to move beyond the days of lots and lots of patient files being passed from doctor to nurse back and forth all over our health service to having one place where all of our patient information is.”

Simon Harris: ‘We need to move beyond the days of lots and lots of patient files being passed from doctor to nurse back and forth’.

Mr Harris said the new system would simplify the process for medical staff as it would mean they would have a “screen on a trolley that they will push around the rooms in the hospital to see the patient rather than having to find the file here, there, and everywhere”.

“This helps our staff in terms of their own efficiencies as they go about their busy jobs. It also helps reduce patient errors.”

The 20-year EIB loan will allow hospitals to move to an electronic health record system. St James’ Hospital in Dublin is one of the first to transfer its records to a digital portal and will be moving to this system from today.

Mr Harris said the move to digital records is “long overdue” and would enable the reconfiguration of services across acute, community, and primary care sectors.

“On a very practical level, if you are not dependent on individual people writing notes and putting them in different places and different files and different pieces of paper and you have one central port that has all of that information about someone’s medication, about who has last seen the patient, about what observations or tests the patient has had or is going to undergo, it co-ordinates that information and therefore improves patient safety and improves outcomes,” said Mr Harris.

Digitisation of the health sector will include the introduction of individual health identifier numbers for every patient in the country and the development of a national shared record system accessible by all healthcare providers.

This is the first eHealth project that the EIB has supported. EIB vice president Andrew McDowell said: “This new engagement demonstrates the EIB’s firm commitment to supporting long-term health investment in Ireland.

“This follows recent support for health investment at the National Children’s Hospital, primary care centres, the Royal College of Surgeons, Irish universities, and medical research by world-class Irish companies.”