Damien McCallion

And we've looked at all of those countries and how they've rolled this out because that's a big challenge.

But as we gradually bring that on, that will open up the potential to making information available to the public through the app.

The key principle you've said it yourself is we have to be transparent and give people access to their own information.

It's their information.

We will have guidelines agreed with our patient groups and with professional bodies.

For example, if I'm going to get bad news and a diagnosis, I may not necessarily want to get that through an app.

Clearly, I might want to talk to my clinician, my GP, my hospital specialist, mental health specialist in the community, wherever it is.

So we do have to have guidelines.

guardrails or guidelines around that and how we make sure that sensitive information is relayed in a way that's appropriate for patients and finds that balance between getting information to us as the public and as patients and still being respectful of that clinical process that people have when they engage with our services.

That's probably principle number one in terms of that transparency, but with guardrails or guidelines, whatever language you want to use around it.

The way we'll build it up will be gradual.

So we'll gradually bring more hospitals on, as I said, in terms of the appointments piece.

We'll also start to bring more community services on, so people will have more of their appointments within the app.

Then in parallel, I mentioned the chronic disease programmes where people are getting their information back.

We're on that programme.

They're able to see that.

And then we're also looking to expand the medicine side to bring in the medicines that are prescribed through GPs, not just those that are reimbursed by the state through our primary care reimbursement services.

So it'll very much be a gradual transition

piece of work as we get better systems in I mentioned our national immunization system we're currently working to get all of our vaccinations on there so at the moment if your COVID vaccine your flu vaccine those all come through to the app at the moment but to give other vaccines and you alluded earlier to another feature that we're doing some work on which is more complex

where perhaps you're the guardian for someone be it a child be it an elderly parent and you want to see their information so how do we build that feature into the app and we're looking at international experience here as well uh so we've england have done a lot of work in this in probably a more complex landscape than ours you know with multiple systems of choice and so on behind the scenes in their hospitals and community and we're taking some guidance from them because they're further on so we're looking at learning from other countries