Departmental Funding
Dail Éireann — 2026-07-07
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Malcolm Byrne (FF), Wicklow-Wexford

I welcome that commitment. It will be transformational. It is my own view, and I do not think it is underestimating it to say, that our records not being digitalised is probably costing our health service up to a billion euro a year in terms of delays and in the failure to be able to use some of that data towards clinical research. We need to start to talk about a campaign for when we move to that situation to encourage citizens to agree to this data being used in an anonymised form to inform clinical research, which will result in further efficiencies. I am worried that we are not moving quickly enough on some of this. Along with the digitalisation process we also need an information campaign to explain to citizens the benefit of what we are actually achieving. There have been 20 years of the Clinical Research Centre at UCD. We should think about the achievements it could have if it were able to have access to some of this data in partnership with other clinical research centres.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-07-07/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:07+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-07-07