The Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA) has today published new Standards, ‘Information Governance and Management Standards for the health identifiers operator in Ireland’, for the introduction of Individual Health Identifiers in Ireland.

An Individual Health Identifier is a unique, non-transferable number assigned to all people using health and social care services in Ireland, which will last for their lifetime. Its purpose is to accurately identify the person, enabling health and social care to be delivered to the right patient, in the right place and at the right time.

Minister for Health Leo Varadkar said: “The Individual Health Identifier will be a major step forward in modernising our health service. It will allow us to follow patients and staff as they move through the health service in a way we currently can't. This will improve patient safety, reduce duplication and errors, and give us a huge amount of new data that we can use to make services more efficient and improve planning.”

HIQA’s Acting Director of Health Information Rachel Flynn said: “Individual health identifiers are the cornerstone of eHealth systems and are key for implementing electronic health records and eHealth solutions such as ePrescribing. These electronic systems will greatly improve patient safety. HIQA has developed these Standards to support the introduction of health identifiers into the Irish healthcare system by providing Standards that the health identifiers operator must put into practice.”

“We have developed these Standards in partnership with a public consultation to support the implementation of the new identifiers. The feedback from the public consultation was extremely positive and highlighted the need for information governance and management of the identifiers. The final Standards were approved by the Board of the Authority last week and submitted for approval to the Minister for Health, Leo Varadkar. The Standards were also issued to the Chief Information Officer of the Health Service Executive (HSE), Richard Corbridge.”

Rachel Flynn continued, “Individual Health Identifiers are essential in ensuring patient safety and improving the sharing of healthcare information between healthcare practitioners. By uniquely identifying service users, it is possible to reduce the number of adverse events that may occur, such as giving the patient incorrect medication or vaccinations, or admitting an incorrect patient for surgery. The use of health identifiers will also reduce duplication and administration work, making them both time and cost effective.”

The Standards present a broad set of basic requirements that underpin the introduction of Individual Health Identifiers in Ireland and will guide the health identifiers operator to establish and manage this national database.

The health identifiers operator in Ireland will be a business unit of the HSE and will be responsible for safely storing all personal data required for use of the identifiers. The Authority will monitor the health identifiers operator’s compliance with the Standards. The HSE has begun to build the necessary infrastructure to implementation the identifier in Ireland and is currently conducting a Privacy Impact Assessment, which is Standard 1.1, to ensure privacy risks are addressed.

Richard Corbridge, Chief Information Officer, HSE said; “The HSE has built the infrastructure required to deliver the Individual Health Identifiers at a national level; this can be made live once the final elements of legislation are formalised and a Privacy Impact Assessment is published. Creating the Individual Health Identifiers is the very first step to truly bringing about benefit to clinical practice through access to information.”

“The HSE will work across three clinical areas in 2015 to trial the use of the Individual Health Identifier in clinical information systems; these will be the Epilepsy Electronic Patient Record, one multi-GP General Practice and the Electronic Medical Record within a hospice. This proof of concept work will deliver clinical benefit into systems as well as prove the operational needs of having the Individual Health Identifiers within these systems.”

“The HSE has worked closely with HIQA to ensure that delivery of the Individual Health Identifiers meets the Standards they have set as well as linking HIQA to the creation of the privacy impact assessment,” Richard Corbridge added.

Rachel Flynn concluded; “Implementation of these Standards will promote trust among the public that the registers are established in line with the law and that the personal information associated with each identifier is properly protected.”

Reports on compliance with the Standards will be published on www.hiqa.ie.

Also released this morning was a Frequently Asked Questions document and the Statement of Outcomes from the public consultation.

Ends.

Further Information: 

Marty Whelan, Head of Communications and Stakeholder Engagement, HIQA
01 814 7480 / 086 2447 623 mwhelan@hiqa.ie

Notes to the Editor: 

• Under Part 2, Section 8 of the Health Act 2007, as amended, the Authority is responsible for setting standards for all aspects of health information and monitoring compliance with those standards.
• The Health Identifiers Act 2014 is the law that underpins the introduction of health identifiers in Ireland. It provides all individuals with a unique health identifier number, and all health services providers with a unique health services provider identifier number.
• An Individual health identifier is a unique number that is assigned to a service user, such as a patient, when a health service is being, has been or may be provided for that service user.
• The health identifiers operator (a business unit of the HSE) will be responsible for setting up two National Registers, the National Register of Individual Health Identifiers and the National Register of Health Services Provider Identifiers that store identifier numbers and all associated identifying information.
• The public consultation consisted of 14 questions, which aimed to ascertain the public’s opinion on the proposed draft standards. There were 70 responses.