The Health Service Executive (HSE) in Ireland has outlined plans for a €263 million digital spend in 2026 through its Digital for Care Capital Plan, including €27 million for an enterprise wireless network to boost connectivity, €8 million for HSE’s shared care record, and €6.7 million for the HSE health app.
The €263 million budget for 2026 is an increase from €190 million in 2025, reflecting the government’s recognition of the importance of investing in digital healthcare, it states. Priorities for this funding cover the HSE health app, which is due to deliver quarterly releases offering improved features and usability; and the HSE shared care record, set to implement a “comprehensive” patient summary including GP medications across the Dublin Southeast and one other region.
Work on EHR for 2026 will be split into four programmes. The HSE national EHR, which will finalise preferred vendors, conduct an EHR readiness assessment on the first of six regions scheduled for rollout, and establish standardised care pathways and processes for major clinical areas.
The HSE maternity and newborn health record will expand to more maternity units in 2026, with HSE planning to assess ambient listening tech in live sites to consider “how best to provide patients with access to their own data on all maternity sites”, including options for integration with the HSE health app.
The children’s health Ireland EHR will be commissioned, and progress on the HSE community care record will include establishing a single point of access for all six regions by June.
Continued expansion of the virtual care programme is another priority area of focus, with the first acute virtual ward to go live in the Western region in Q1 2026, and a remote monitoring solution to be procured. Capacity will be increased for acute virtual wards to 100 beds per region, and regional virtual care hubs will be developed, with a telehealth centre of excellence to be established to promote consistency in supporting patients at home.
Broader work is to be done for the health identifiers service, with plans to continue to deploy individual health identifiers to digital health records as a way of joining up records held on different systems or in different health settings. In 2026, this will move to focus on patient records held in community pharmacy systems. Data infrastructure will similarly be expanded to facilitate strategic programmes like EHR.
Elsewhere, 2026 will see the go-live of the hospital medicines management system across 12 national sites, procurement of the national electronic prescribing service and dispensing solution, and the development of the national medicinal product catalogue for integration with the hospital medicines management system by Q4.
The national imaging system will connect more sites, and offer access to “proven” AI solutions to support the work of radiologists, and AI and automation will be implemented on a national scale for stroke identification, radiology, echocardiograms, and administration. The enterprise wireless local area network programme is further hoped to achieve wireless coverage in 70 percent of health service locations.
Wider trend: Digital transformation in Ireland
The Government of Ireland has shared its Community Pharmacy Agreement, outlining digital priorities across pharmacy IT integration, e-prescribing, data sharing, and vendor engagement, with a view to ensuring “community pharmacists are better equipped to contribute to national health priorities”. Pharmacy IT systems should be ready to integrate with core national digital assets such as the national shared care record and e-prescribing service, the government notes, as “the success depends on pharmacy’s ability to connect securely, share data in structured and coded formats, and do so in real time”. It states its Health Information Act will establish a legal framework to make pharmacy data part of a patient’s longitudinal health record.
Ireland’s Minister for Health, Jennifer Carroll MacNeill, has shared the impact of virtual care initiatives, highlighting “significant progress” around patient outcomes and relieving pressure on hospital capacity. Two pilot acute virtual wards at St. Vincent’s University Hospital and University Hospital Limerick have accrued 1,500 admissions, reportedly equating to 13,800 virtual bed days. A further four virtual wards have now been launched at Our Lady of Lourdes Drogheda, Midland Regional Hospital Tullamore, Mercy Hospital Cork, and St Luke’s Hospital Kilkenny; with plans for a fifth at Galway University Hospital in early 2026. A virtual ward at Letterkenny has produced similar “remarkable” results, according to the Minister, producing an 18 percent reduction in acute admissions to the hospital in 2025.
The Irish government has published a national digital mental health strategy, focusing on access, communications, digital tools, co-production, research, innovation, and technology. Key digital initiatives include the HSE Health App, national shared care record, community care record, and EHR. The new strategy builds on the “Sharing the Vision” mental health policy for 2020-2030, which featured two recommendations specifically on digital and technology: the use of social media channels and digital in promoting mental health services and signposting support; and digital health solutions to support service delivery and empower service users.
