HSE to introduce €100m system for State's vaccine programmes

The HSE said that the new system will record all vaccines offered on a national basis, with priority initially to be given to the primary childhood immunisations programme delivered to all children in their first 13 months of life. File photo: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg

The HSE is to spend up to €100m on the provision of a national immunisation system to record all vaccine programmes offered by the State and to support their delivery.

The health service has gone to tender for the production of a dynamic purchasing system for a period of six years which will see the creation of the National Immunisation Information System.

This will serve as an extension of the existing World Health Organisation-backed Covax system, which was first deployed during the covid pandemic from December 2020 when the first vaccines for the coronavirus began to come on stream.

A HSE spokesperson said that the new tender will see the creation of “a panel of qualified vendors”, from whom the eventual successful contractors will be selected.

They said that the system is intended to support the delivery of vaccine programmes, the effective monitoring of the coverage of vaccines across the population, and to allow “targeted action to address any health inequalities”.

The HSE said that the new system will record all vaccines offered on a national basis, with priority initially to be given to the primary childhood immunisations programme delivered to all children in their first 13 months of life.

Newborn children in Ireland typically receive 12 injections over five visits to their local nurse by the time they are 13 months old — vaccinating from ailments like meningococcal disease and rotavirus.

The HSE said that it is planned for the primary immunisations programme to be live within the national immunisation system by October 2025, with other implementation timelines “currently under review”.

Covax system

The Covax system has undergone “significant development” in the three years since it was deployed, the HSE said, adding that the system is now capable of “managing multiple vaccine types”. Covax is a cloud-based platform which currently is used to record covid, influenza, and pneumococcal disease vaccinations.

The spokesperson described Covax as “an established and embedded cornerstone of the national IT infrastructure”, adding that it is “currently the largest patient database in the HSE”. Covax was used to record 400,000 vaccinations at its peak during covid.

The HSE said the platform had facilitated 2.2 million self-registrations for vaccinations, and had been used to create more than 7.5 million appointments.

The system has assimilated more than six million vaccination records from GPs and a further two million from pharmacies, the HSE said, with 20,000 clinical and operational staff having been trained up on the system.