Damien McCallion

to the public through the app largely because it's what the public want so when hick would do a study every year on the public's appetite if you like for digital health the numbers are typically in the high 80s to 90 percent of people who expect and want the health service to be able to talk to them around their health care

through digital means, be that the app or other ways of doing so.

The same as you would for your bank or for other services that we all use now, book a flight, travel and so on and so forth.

So that's it.

It's really going to be the trusted location of choice for the public, but it won't be the only avenue.

We will have other channels to communicate, but we want to route as much as possible through that.

One, it's what the public want.

Two, it's also much more efficient use of taxpayers' money and anything we can save on that can be reinvested in frontline care.

Yeah, it's a fair comparison.

I mean, health care, health and social care, and it's important, of course, because we cover everything, mental health, disability, social inclusion, palliative care, primary care, older persons, as well as acute care.

We tend to think of hospitals, but of course, our responsibility is the entire gambit of health and social care for the population of Ireland.

So security and authentication and reliability is really important and trust is important.

And to be fair, the public have generally, the feedback we've had is they trust information from the HSE.

One of the challenges with the wider internet now is it can often be hard to know what's real, what's partially true and what is not true.

And we've seen it even in some of the early adaptations of AI around health care where it can be very powerful.

But equally, when it goes wrong, it has challenges.

So we have a responsibility, I guess, as the people who provide health services on behalf of the public here in Ireland, on behalf of government, that we make sure that what we put in through is secure, is safe and gives people reliable access to information.

I guess the key thing for us is we are trying to invest in what we would call the core systems that we need in our health service in order to provide that information.

So one of the challenges we've had and one of the reasons Ireland has scored so badly on digital health has been that we haven't got those foundational systems to give you that common data that you can then present to the public, whether you live in Donegal or North Dublin or Wexford.

And that is the challenge.