A number of firsts have occurred in the past 12 months, says David Clancy, director and country general manager of Oracle Health. In July 2025, University Maternity Hospital Limerick and its satellite locations went live with the region’s first electronic health record (EHR), shortly followed by the introduction of the EHR at the Coombe Hospital in Dublin. The completion of Phase 2 of the HSE’s MN-CMS programme means that every maternity hospital serving the Greater Dublin Area and beyond has a shared electronic health record, Clancy points out.“This now means that two out of every three children born over the last couple of years are starting their life out with an electronic patient record.” In addition, electronic ordering and resulting for laboratory tests, and upgrading the lab system at Cavan General Hospital as part of the MedLIS programme, was completed. “This has replaced paper and made a single lab record now available for patients at those sites and Beaumont Hospital, with more sites going live in the Dublin North East region this year.” All in, Oracle Health EHR and related products are now live in more than 10 public sites, with over 14,000 regular clinical and administrative end users. David Clancy, director and country general manager of Oracle Health These developments have resulted in a strong foundational basis for broader digital adoption, with Clancy saying this milestone is important when it comes to derisking the ambitious Digital for Care plan, and anticipating adoption challenges.“The first few yards in any journey can be the most difficult, and the HSE has made a lot of the hard yards in terms of the design and deployment of these solutions with Oracle Health,” he explains. The key is to now build on this proven model and examples of successful EHR adoption, he adds. “We now have a proven blueprint for success, so we can accelerate our deployments with far fewer challenges,” Clancy says. “Instead of trying to reinvent the process and debating what will or won’t work, we can go to St James’s Hospital and see how the EHR works, or to the Rotunda, to the National Maternity Hospital, Coombe, Limerick, or any of the different types of venues where the Oracle Health EHR is already live and configured for the Irish setting then apply these learnings and approach in the additional venues.”In any digital transformation, there is a need to get the technology right, but the human aspect is also critical. Clancy says there has been significant clinical engagement to ensure that the roll-out to date has been as seamless as possible. Hospitals also report that staff are spending less time on paperwork and more time actually talking and engaging with the patients, which can only be a good thing— David Clancy, director and country general manager of Oracle Health“At the 10 facilities where we are live with EHR, all the clinicians are trained on the system. We can’t afford to take thousands of hours away from clinicians to go out and configure new systems and train on them. Services need to continue.”But at these facilities, the digital transformation is far from over; Clancy emphasises that a key piece is ongoing optimisation of the service. “We are continually enhancing our products and our solutions, and so we know we need to build that into the roll-out as well, making sure that the end users get the latest and greatest when it’s available.” This includes responding to feedback from clinicians and other healthcare staff. “With some of our programmes, we’re setting up clinical advisory groups which include representatives from existing live sites but also would-be future sites. These groups then engage on what’s the latest on the programme that we’re rolling out, and we look at the product roadmap taking feedback from that clinical advisory group into account.”While an EHR as part of a suite of digital solutions makes life easier for clinicians, the ultimate beneficiary is, of course, the patient. “If we’re not delivering the benefits to the patients, there’s no point in doing it,” Clancy asserts.But the evidence shows there very much is a point: for example, with paper prescribing now replaced by digital with the HSE’s MN-CMS programme, pharmacy care issues in the hospitals where the EHR is live are down by over 70 per cent in some cases.“Hospitals also report that staff are spending less time on paperwork and more time actually talking and engaging with the patients, which can only be a good thing.”The next big leap, according to Clancy, is allowing the patient to have access to their own health information. The HSE continues to roll-out its patient app and develop a shared care record which will help with this, and Clancy believes Oracle are well placed to support these and other initiatives. “Because we have been live here so long, we are uniquely placed to help the HSE with achieving its full digital programme, and the difference with us is that we can show that it works across multiple venues of care, because we’ve done so much of the hard work already.”