Ireland
The Irish Adoption Site is a joint national partnership between the Department of Health (DoH) and the Health Service Executive (HSE) working with the solution provider Gnomon Informatics S.A. 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 eHealth Network (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 and 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 has developed a national shared care record and is in procurement for a new 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. EHDS priority categories for the exchange of patient summary information and for ePrescriptions / dispensations will be fulfilled by the development of the national shared care record and our national eP solution, while the Health App will empower citizens to access and take responsibility for their health data. xShare is an important component in empowering citizens with access to their digital health records and enhancing care, as xShare will enable citizens to exchange their health information with trusted health care professionals by utilizing the Download and One time share functionality, currently for the PS.
The initial focus in the development and release of the HSE App was on usability and priority data sets. The HSE App is now working on Release 6 (release date 20th July ‘26) and its continued focus is adding priority data sets, and self-administered functionality. We have discussed the integration and release of the xShare Button into the HSE App which will now occur outside of the timeline of this xShare project due to the focus on integrating priority data categories.
Personas - use cases
Priority categories
International Patient Summary (IPS)
Yellow Button basic functionalities
Download
Architecture
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.
Timeline
- [M1-M9] Definition of stories, user requirements and business use case for the Yellow Button
- [M9-M16] Develop CDA to FHIR conversion process, refine data sets and mappings
- [M18] Proof of concept with the eHealthPass app and testing yellow button download via IHE Plugathon with peer network
- [M18-M24] Assess the adoption needs of the national app to receive the patient summary and the yellow button
- [M24-M30] Assess the integration requirement to upload the patient summary information into the National Shared Care Record
The National Shared Care record is in development and will be deployed on a phased basis. We anticipate integration in 2027
Demonstrations / interviews
Challenges and Remarks
The key challenge for Ireland’s health system is to enable the digitalization and sharing of structured and coded health records to EHDS specifications. This challenge and framework to achieve this is presented in our Digital for Care Strategy, and Digital for Care Implementation Framework in which we detail 48 key national initiatives to deliver digital for care.
This xShare project provides the framework and technical specifications to enable the citizen share data via the national health app, which is highlighted as a key enabled for “Patient as an Empowered Partner” in the illustration above. Ireland has demonstrated this xShare functionality as per our demonstrator video and screenshots. The health app will incorporate xShare pending the development of the international patient summary in our national health system.
Ireland will enable both EHDS and International Patient Summary reports in our national health app and national shared care record to meet our EHDS commitments. We are resolving access to primary health data sources, and data quality issues, via the national shared care record program. The National Shared Care Record will act as the primary aggregator of structured coded health data and source for both the HSE app and the Irish National Contact Point (NCP) to meet our EHDS regulations.
To assist with the development and integration of xShare into our national health app, the Irish team have worked with xShare and our solution provider to successfully participate in both 2025 and 2026 Plugathon’s. We are pleased to confirm that we achieved xShare Industrial Silver Label certification and are positioned to integrate the yellow button into our national health app.