HSE patient app will go live by end of this year 

The app will eventually offer patients a single door into all public health services, giving them the ability to change appointments or look up accurate health information.

The move is happening in parallel with re-activated plans for digital health records. Such records are currently only used in four maternity hospitals, while one acute hospital has its own system.

“The app will be the patients’ window into their information,” Mr McCallion told the Irish Examiner.

“The pilot is complete, that was done in the summer and was quite successful. There will be a national launch, and people will need to use their MyGov ID [to access the app].

“The first phase will be at the end of this year”.

The app will host digital cards for the European Health Insurance Card system and medication details, although this will be limited to medical card patients at first. Mr McCallion said: 

"We’re focusing particularly initially on women, and those maternity services where we have an electronic health record.

There’s lots of different apps in the HSE at the moment, we have apps for people with ADHD and all sorts of examples. We want to consolidate all of those in this secure app.

“If you’re dealing with the public healthcare system, this should be the single authenticated route for you to get access to your information.”

He moved to reassure people the app will be secure, saying while there are always risks, that “significant investment” has been made since the devastating cyberattack in 2021 on the HSE.

He said access to wi-fi will be essential for this: “[We will] put out an enterprise wi-fi system throughout the HSE where, irrespective of where you are as a staff member or patient, you will have access to wi-fi.”

The plan is for this to happen by the end of 2025, and he said this is a huge project for hospitals and community sites.

In the move towards having a single number to identify each patient, an “individual health identifier” is already applied to information such as charts or blood results for internal use.

“The part of the health identifier in the public eyes in the PPS number,” he said.

“We’re going to be starting a campaign through next year to maximise use of that number as a means to identify all of us because the advantage then it allows us to verify that the person say who they say they are.”

He expects this will take “a couple of years” to complete, including filling already existing systems with those numbers.