Dáil Éireann Debate, Wednesday - 6 October 2021
141. Deputy Mark Ward asked the Minister for Health further to Parliamentary Question No. 1120 of 9 September 2021, the status of the single integrated financial and procurement management system; when it will be rolled out; the benefits of same; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [48504/21]
View answerThe Integrated Financial management Systems (IFMS) is a single national finance and procurement system for the entire health sector. It has been developed under the HSE Finance Reform Programme – a significant transformation programme for the health sector in terms of scale and complexity. The financial reform programme is well advanced with much work done across the HSE at a tactical level to align existing, processes and upgrade legacy regional financial systems where this is possible. IFMS will provide better reporting, management, governance, compliance and transparency, and a better overall financial control environment, commensurate with the scale and complexity of the HSE and the funding provided for health services in Ireland. IFMS will also provide a single standardised financial and procurement system to voluntary organisations will, for the first time, provide quality standardised financial and procurement information across both statutory and voluntary services.
Building on the success of the work done to date, a detailed design for configuration of the SAP systems underpinning IFMS was completed in July of this year. The next phase of the programme is the build, configuration and test phase. This will be followed by a phased rollout of over a 4 year period. The deployment plan will ensure that sites that manage the majority of expenditure will be deployed first, followed by smaller sites in year 4.
