The Irish Adoption Site is a joint national partnership between the Department of Health (DoH) and the Health Service Executive (HSE). The DoH is responsible for the development of health strategy and the HSE is responsible for the implementation and operations of this health strategy.
The Department of Health launched our national digital strategy for eHealth titled “Digital for Care – A Digital Health Framework for Ireland 2024- 2030″, in conjunction with the “HSEs Digital Health Strategic Implementation Roadmap”. This sets out joint aims and action plans, to digitally transform the Irish health system to use digital technology to improve national health services, make them more accessible and empower the citizen.
To ensure a seamless and secure delivery of Digital for Care, the implementation roadmap is driven by six core principles: Patient as an Empowered Partner, Workforce & Workplace, Digitally Enabled and Connected Care, Data Driven Services, Digital Health Ecosystem & Innovation, Secure Foundations & Digital Enablers.
Ireland is an active member of the eHN and continues to engage extensively in EHDS development, to include the patient summary and ePrescription standards, guidelines and datasets.
Ireland commissioned the design and development of the national architecture to support the implementation of EHDS in Ireland, linked to national solutions for the deployment of digital health. Since 2018, Ireland successfully participated in Wave 3, 4, 5, 6 ,7 & 8 Testing for Patient Summary services with EU Member States and Ireland went live with NCP B Patient Summary Services in 2024.
Ireland participated in PATHeD (2023-24) to provide for the seamless translation of patient summary information, The PATHeD project developed, tested and brought into production a first version of a citizen access mobile app toolkit together with enhanced data sharing capabilities for the European Union and implementing Member States. The project tested a mobile app reference implementation for citizen access to their translated Patient Summary, deploy the tools most appropriate for the national eHealth infrastructures and provide the first evaluation of the extended MyHealth@EU. We are now building on our PATHeD experiences with this xShare project to enable EU citizens share this Patient Summary information in a seamless manner with trusted healthcare professionals.
Ireland is currently developing a national shared care record, a national eP / eD solution, and enhancing our national Health App, to enable the sharing of standardised, interoperable digital health records, and to meet our EHDS commitments. xShare is an important component in empowering citizens with access to their digital health records and enhancing care.
Ireland is developing a national shared care record, and associated architecture, for patient summary data, and our priority is to enable the exchange of health data adhering to EHDS regulations. We plan to integrate xShare Yellow Button into this service to enable the sharing of patient summary information.
The architecture for the Irish National Contact point was designed and developed to support the implementation of EHDS, as outlined in the high-level diagrams (below).
The key data flows are outlined in the diagram below. National Share Care Record will integrate with the National Contact Point via FHIR based API to share patient information with the mobile health app.
Development of the national shared care record is paramount to the provision and sharing of patient summary records. The IE xShare team integrate with the national shared care records team to ensure requirements and developments meet EHDS requirements and integrate with xShare Yellow Button.
Myhealth.EU@HSE.ie
