The Business Post’s Smart Health Summit brought together over 400 healthcare leaders and decision makers to explore smarter health technology tools and solutions that enhance patient outcomes and productivity. Over 40 speakers participated in the agenda from the US, Turkey, Denmark, Brussels, the UK and elsewhere covering issues from building the critical infrastructure to enabling digital health, AI in healthcare, scaling innovation and driving a culture of digital innovation in our healthcare system.
Ireland is now “in the midst of unprecedented expansion of the public health system”, but trails other developed countries in urgent technological areas like digital patient records, says Robert Watt, the Department of Health’s secretary general. “When it comes to many areas of healthcare we’re as good as other countries – in this area, we’re not,” Watt told delegates gathering for the September 10 conference at Croke Park.
But more optimistically, if Ireland is “a laggard and behind the curve”, this is “an opportunity to leapfrog ahead of people on the continent who’ve been doing this for 20 years. We can avoid some of their mistakes,” conference chair Ivan Yates told the sixth annual summit.
Brussels leads the way with the European Health Data Space, whose MyHealth@EU service offers EU citizens a way to take their patient histories and prescriptions with them electronically across the EU, says Dr Andrzej Rys, a former Polish health minister, now principal scientific adviser at the European Commission’s directorate general for health who was presenting the Opening Keynote Address on ‘Redefining health data management’.
Fourteen member states are live with at least one service, with six more scheduled to go live this year, said Rys, one of the conference’s 45 speakers. “We start to see the direction of travel, we have the map, but we are still in the rough sea, and I don’t need to explain to you Irish people, we need to have safe weather,” says Rys.
When it comes to digital health, Northern Ireland has made significant strides by introducing new electronic patient records in November 2023 and offers a “headline” example “that a shared care record can happen at a low cost for our whole jurisdiction”, notes Neil Black, a consultant physician and chief clinical information officer at Northern Ireland’s Western Health and Social Care Trust. “I remember, as a junior doctor, filing out a four-sided form to ask for a test, then going down to check several days later when it hadn’t been done and being told there was no record,” he says, something which doesn’t happen now.
If “you’re not going to have a paper file move around the country and follow patients”, then a “digital backbone is as essential as lighting, heat, and power”, observes Kelan Daly, head of healthcare consulting at KPMG. Daly spoke as part of a discussion on Irish healthcare’s digital adoption challenges, alongside Louise Callanan, chief information officer for HSE Southwest; Raphael Jaffrezic, group transformation director at Blackrock Health; and Deirdre Hyland, health information programme manager for the Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA).
Among the benefits Ireland will receive from digitising its patient data is more efficient patient referral and waiting list management, says Angela Single, business development director at Novari Health, a Canadian healthcare software provider. Once you’ve made waiting list data electronic, then AI can “show teams where they’ve got difficulties, so they can use their resources more effectively”, she says. Canadian providers have “reduced their burden by 51 per cent” using Novari’s software, Single notes.
Irish GPs have been to the forefront of digitisation within the healthcare system, often being more digitally advanced than hospitals and the HSE, and offer an example to the rest of the country’s health care, states Eileen Byrne, managing director at Clanwilliam Ireland, an Irish-based global health technology group. “GPs have digitised for 25 years now,” she says, introducing Pippo, an innovative patient-focused app designed to streamline and simplify interactions between patients and GPs in Ireland.
And Europe may offer Ireland a useful nudge to keep up. Beyond the European Health Data Space, June 2025 is the compliance deadline for an EU Accessibility Act, notes Clare Harney. This means “ensuring that any information or communications about products, services, and treatments must be understandable to all, and that includes people with disabilities, perhaps older people, people who may not be technologically literate”, says Harney, principal consultant at Santegic, an Irish company working with health providers and technology innovators. Judging compliance is easiest using software, there are “penalties for non-compliance, and besides that, it’s the right thing to do”, she adds.
Turning ink-and-paper patient records digital also means being “flexible both with the data and adjacent information we keep, because standards unfortunately keep on changing too”, observes Brad Porter, chief executive of the New Zealand-based maker of health care software Orion Health. Brad was part of a panel discussing driving change through system-wide intelligence and analytics and was joined by Ashish Kumar Jha, associate professor in business analytics, Trinity Business School; Lynn Guthrie, chief strategy officer, Bon Secours Health System; and Peter Connolly, delivery director, cyber transformation, HSE.
“The Stone Age did not end because we ran out of stones,” says Süleyman Sevinç, chief executive of Labenko, a Turkish start-up helping hospitals handle blood samples, but “because we changed our mentality. Making expensive purchases isn’t going to get you to the promised land, it’s changing thinking.”
An example where changed mindsets might be necessary could be GDPR, in Ireland often used as an excuse to block researchers’ access to health care data, says Mark Lawler, a cancer researcher and digital health professor and chair in Translational Cancer Genomics at Queen’s University Belfast. “It is disgraceful the way that GDPR has been interpreted in Ireland – it’s not fair on patients, citizens, researchers,” Lawler argues.
In Northern Ireland, “we looked at the impact of Covid on cancer patients in five NI trusts” and quickly found 70 per cent of people referred for suspicious symptoms were not seeing a cancer specialist. But “If I were trying to do that in Ireland, I’d still be doing it,” he says.
Mark Lawler spoke on a panel discussing Ireland’s strategy for implementing the EHDS and was joined by Muiris O’Connor, assistant secretary, Department of Health; Sinead O’Connor, adjunct assistant professor, School of Medicine, Trinity College Dublin; and Patrick Reidy, collaboration lead, EIT Health Ireland-UK.
An example of where Ireland is embracing digital care lies in dermatology, where 48,000 people in Ireland now await an outpatient appointment, says Dr Nicholas Young, the VHI’s group healthcare officer and a consultant emergency physician. Private patients currently face waiting for a year and public patients for two to three to see a hospital consultant. But a new collaboration lets VHI and HSE patients instead go to one of AllView Healthcare’s 14 clinics across Ireland, says Eoin O’Reilly, chief executive of AllView, a teledermatology start-up which has so far treated 25,000 patients. A nurse takes high-resolution images of their affected area and a medical history, with a consultant reviewing the material. The consultant then decides if the person requires surgery, or can be safely treated by their GP, O’Reilly told a panel in one of the conference’s three breakout sessions. The AllView appointments are available within 14 days, ten for VHI members.
But those who would digitise Irish healthcare can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, says Blackrock Health’s Raphael Jaffrezic. “Every provider is talking for the last ten to 15 years about what is ideal. The UK has tried for 20 years, and failed many times before they’ve been successful. We just need to allow ourselves to fail, and start now,” says Jaffrezic.
And while there is “a lot of talk of Ireland being a laggard” in adopting digital health, “the stuff that has happened in this country in the last decade has been amazing,” argues Richard Corbridge, digital director general at Britain’s Department for Work and Pensions and previously the HSE’s chief information officer.
“People are engaged, you can fill a room like this,” he said, referring to the conference. “And people want to help each other, like this. This doesn’t happen everywhere.”