In a world of instant communication and shrinking attention spans, the first thing to say about the swanky new HSE Health App is that it takes its time.
It’s not that the download took long – it was on my phone by the time I’d travelled on a Luas from Parnell Square to Trinity. But the first message I get after logging on, using the MyGovID details, was that it was “loading your information [and] it can take up to 24 hours for all your data to appear.”
“What? 24 hours? That’s ridiculous,” I thought peevishly. “It’s not like HSE has much of my data to upload.”
That is because I’m fortunate that my interactions with the health authority have been minimal over the last 30 years.
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As I waited, I toured the app.
At first glance it seems limited, particularly when compared with apps that monitor my health in the most minute detail, with everything from my exercise and blood oxygen levels to my resting heart rate and my sleeping, breathing and almost every other health metric you can imagine faithfully recorded by a tech giant.
But the HSE is not Apple and lacks the financial wherewithal or the tech vision to intrude on my life in such a fashion and store the data for whatever nefarious purposes is has planned for the future.
While it warned that uploading my info could take 24 hours, it had everything in less than two.
I was mildly surprised to see it had stored my flu and Covid vaccine details over the last three years, which is longer than I had them stored in my brain.
[ HSE launches app for patients to ‘manage care’ onlineOpens in new window ]
Of more value is the appearance of my European Health Insurance Card and my Drug Payment Scheme card.
It also promises to help me see my hospital appointments – but only if I’m a maternity patient. Non-maternity patients can’t see such details yet, but the HSE is working on it.
The app cannot – it warns – be used to cancel or reschedule appointments and there does not appear to be any plan to add that functionality.
Aside from my own info, such as it is, there are other resources and information that may be useful.
There is an option to upload all the medicines I’m on and a Health A-Z covering dozens of issues from abdominal aortic aneurysms to the Zika virus.
To its credit, the explainer is easy to navigate and should help people uncover information about many health concerns without needing to refer to the sometimes terrifying and misleading Dr Google.
There’s a mental health plan designed to help people “find ways to improve stress, low mood or sleep problems”, and explainers of anxiety, stress, sleep issues and “low mood”, as well as the contact details for the Samaritans and the numbers to call for those in a mental health crisis.
At this point the app crashes, so I have to shut it down and start again.
It offers a search facility for people looking for urgent care, GPs, primary care centres and hospitals wherever they are located, and it has details of opening hours and contact details.
Perhaps of most interest is not what’s there now, but what’s coming later.
The HSE is promising notifications and reminders about appointments and vaccines and will let people see their prescriptions, find out when they have been referred for tests, and check waiting times for scheduled tests and for emergency departments.
If the app shortens the time people have to wait in such places even marginally, then it will be worth more than almost all the swankier health apps on our phones.
