Galway Hospital set to be first nationwide to offer full patient access to records

Galway Bay fm newsroom – Galway Clinic is set to become the first hospital in Ireland to provide patients will full access to their health records.
The private hospital at Doughiska is currently upgrading its Electronic Health Record system and hopes to grant patients full access next year.
Last year, the Galway Clinic received an accolade from global organisation the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society for their EHR system.
The hospital was the first in the UK and Ireland to receive the award – and one of just 47 hospitals across Europe.
Galway Clinic’s electronic Health Record System now accounts for over 95% of all patient charts – and it’s aiming to make those records fully available to patients by November 2016.
Chief Information Officer at Galway Clinic, Raphael Jaffrezic, says it’s important for patients to be active players in their own treatment.
Meanwhile, University Hospital Galway and Merlin Park Hospital announced last year that they would to spend seven million euro on switching from paper records to such a system.
The public hospitals are set to spend the next five years scanning patient documents to create Electronic Health Records – in a bid to save both time and money down the line.