It is a fair question: if the HSE now gives me an app with my vaccinations, my medical card and my waiting lists in it, why would I keep a health record of my own as well?
The short version is that they are different kinds of thing, and they are not really competing. The HSE Health App is a window onto some of the information the HSE holds about you. A personal health record app is your own copy, which you fill in and nobody sees unless you decide they should. Most people are better off with both, for the same reason you keep your own payslips even though Revenue has the figures too.
Disclosure
I am a doctor, and I founded exora, which is a personal health record app. So I have a stake in one half of this comparison, and you should read it accordingly.
What I have tried to do about that: describe the HSE Health App fairly, including what it does better than any private app can, and be specific about where a personal health record app, mine included, does not help. If you want a wider comparison of the apps available in Ireland, I wrote one here.
The short answer
- The HSE Health App is the official app of the Irish public health service. It shows your vaccination records, your health cards, medicines the HSE has paid for, some hospital information and your waiting lists. It fills itself in, it is free, and the HSE is adding to it.
- A personal health record app is a private record you create and control. You fill it in, by uploading documents or typing. Nobody can see it, including your doctor, unless you share it.
- The practical difference: the HSE app shows what the HSE has chosen to put in it so far. A personal health record is everything you can gather, from your GP, public and private hospitals and abroad, in one place.
What the HSE Health App actually is
The HSE launched the app in February 2025 (HSE). According to its own help page, you must be aged 16 or older to use it, and to see your personal health information you need to log in with a verified MyGovID. Without logging in you can still use the general parts, such as information on conditions and finding services near you.
Once you are logged in, the HSE says you can see, among other things:
- your COVID-19 and flu vaccine records
- your health cards, such as a medical card, GP visit card, Drugs Payment Scheme card or EHIC, with card numbers and expiry dates
- medicines refunded under the medical card or Drugs Payment Scheme, which appear automatically and are updated every three months
- a list of your own medicines and allergies, which you type in yourself
- what waiting lists you are on, and GP referrals made on your behalf
- your hospital discharge summaries and a record of hospital procedures, if you are on the latest version
- maternity and BreastCheck appointments, from the hospitals and services that share them
For vaccinations and health cards it is already the easiest place in Ireland to look, and it costs nothing.
What is in it, and what is not
The HSE is open about the gaps. Its help page says “not all referrals are available in the app yet” and “not all hospital appointments can be seen in the app”. Appointments only appear from the hospitals and community services that share their information, which the page lists. You cannot cancel or reschedule through the app.
Just as telling is what neither the help page nor the HSE’s feature list mentions. Neither lists your GP’s notes, your test results, or the letters a consultant writes to your GP. Information about your conditions and procedures is listed as work in progress, and prescriptions and dispensed medicines as something the HSE is working on next (HSE: what the app does now). So is managing health information for children and people you care for. You will only see your own cards in the app.
Private care is the other gap. A private hospital, a consultant’s rooms or a private scan clinic are not part of the HSE, and nothing on either page suggests their records reach the app.
Ireland has no national patient record yet
This is the biggest difference from some other countries. In Ireland, your GP keeps your GP record on the practice’s own system, each hospital keeps its own, and private providers keep theirs. There is no single national record that pulls these together for you, or for a doctor treating you somewhere new.
That is planned, not here. The government’s digital health framework, Digital for Care 2024-2030, included a patient app, a “Shared Care Record” to “integrate patient records no matter what part of the health service they engage with”, and, longer term, electronic health records (Department of Health). The app has arrived; the rest is still to come.
The law has moved too. The Health Information Act 2026, signed on 30 April 2026, says the HSE “may create for, and assign to, every patient a national electronic health record” (section 10), and provides for guidelines on how patients will access it (section 21). But the Act comes into force in parts, on dates the Minister sets by order (section 1), and I could not confirm that the electronic health record has been created for anyone yet. Treat it as the direction of travel.
Everything else: your right of access
For anything the app does not show, you have a legal route. Under Article 15 of the GDPR, you can ask any provider, public or private, for a copy of the information it holds about you. It is normally free, and they have one month to respond, extendable by two more months for complex requests. This is called a subject access request.
For the HSE, there is a subject access request form, sent with photo ID to the regional office for where you were treated. For the HSE and the voluntary hospitals you can also use Freedom of Information. For your GP or a private provider, a short email to the practice manager is enough. Our Ireland records guide walks through both routes step by step.
What a personal health record app is
A personal health record belongs to the patient, not to a provider or the State. The category ranges from a manual logbook on your phone to a cloud service that reads your documents for you.
Two properties define it. You fill it in, by uploading documents, connecting a device or typing. And you control access completely: by default nobody else can see any of it, including a doctor treating you, until you choose to share.
That cuts both ways: it is a privacy feature and a safety limitation at once.
The six differences that actually matter
1. Who fills it in
The HSE app is fed by HSE systems, automatically. A personal health record is fed by you: more work, and the reason it can hold things the HSE never put online.
2. Who can see it
Your GP record is seen by your practice, and your hospital records by the hospital. A personal health record is seen by nobody until you share it. Neither is simply better; they suit different purposes.
3. A view versus your own copy
The HSE app shows you selected information from HSE systems. A personal health record holds the actual documents - the photographed letter, the private lab’s PDF, the scan report from 2009 - and, in apps that read them, the information pulled out.
4. How far back it goes
The biggest practical gap. The HSE app shows what the HSE has connected so far, and it holds nothing from abroad. A personal health record goes as far back as the documents you can lay hands on.
5. What you can do with it
The HSE app is built for health cards, vaccinations, appointments and waiting lists, and it does those well. Personal health record apps vary, but the better ones let you search everything, follow a result over many years across different labs, and share a chosen part of your record with a chosen person for a set time.
6. What happens when you move
The HSE app is for people in the Irish public health system. Move abroad and it stops being much use. A personal health record goes wherever you go, which matters if you ever do; our guide to moving countries with your medical records covers what to gather first.
Three situations that make it concrete
You are in a clinic in Spain and the doctor asks what you take
You remember two of your medicines. The dose of the third, and the antibiotic that gave you a rash in 2019, are gone. You could open the HSE app: medicines refunded under the medical card or Drugs Payment Scheme are there, though the list is only updated every three months, and the allergy list is only as good as what you typed in. Your Spanish doctor cannot be given access to the app.
With a record of your own, you send a link that shows your medications and allergies and nothing else, set to expire in two days. The doctor opens it in a browser. When you get home, you switch it off.
A new private consultant wants the relevant history, not your life story
You are happy for a cardiologist to see your medications, conditions and recent bloods, and would rather they did not read everything else.
The HSE app is designed for you to see your own information. I could not find a feature on the HSE’s pages for sending a chosen part of it to a named person for a set period. A personal health record shares by category, to one person, with an expiry, and can be revoked from one screen.
You are unconscious in an emergency department in Cork
Here, honestly, nothing on your phone is much use, including my app. A locked phone in a bag is not a health record. Ireland does not yet have the national summary record that would let emergency staff look up your medicines and allergies without you. Until it does, the hospital works from its own records and from whoever is with you.
A personal record helps only indirectly: if a partner already has a shared view of your medicines and allergies, they can show it.
Consent runs in opposite directions. Health service records are available to the clinicians caring for you because that is what makes care safe. A personal health record asks first: access exists only because you created it, for the scope and period you chose.
And the counterweight, because it belongs here rather than in a footnote: none of this makes the HSE careless with your information. Its records are governed by data protection law, Freedom of Information law and a regulator you can complain to, the Data Protection Commission. A young private company, mine included, cannot match that kind of institutional accountability, and you should weigh it accordingly.
So do you need both?
For most people, yes, and they complement each other.
Keep the HSE Health App. It is free, official and growing. Use it for your vaccinations, health cards, waiting lists and appointments, and check it after a hospital stay for the discharge summary.
Keep your own record for everything else. Your GP’s notes and test results, once you have asked for them. The private care. The hospital that does not share with the app. The time abroad. The question “when did this start?” that nobody can answer without reading twelve letters side by side.
The two failure modes are equally common: assuming the HSE app is your medical record, and assuming clinicians can see your own app. Neither is true.
Where exora fits
exora is a personal health record app, so everything above about the category applies to it. What it adds is the reading. You upload documents, such as PDFs, photos or scans, and exora reads them for you, with a reading system built for medical records. It pulls out the clinical details and builds one searchable record with a timeline. Results from different labs land on one trend line. Every fact links back to the document it came from, so you can check it. You can share a chosen part of your record by link, with an expiry, and revoke it at any time. Your health data is never used to train AI models. exora is free to start, with an optional membership.
Where it does not help, plainly:
- No HSE connection. exora has no link to the HSE Health App, MyGovID, your GP’s system or any HSE service. You request your records, or download what you can, and upload them yourself.
- Your data is stored in Sydney, Australia. That is outside the EU. exora has no HSE approval or Irish health-data certification. How we handle data is on our security page; read it before you upload anything.
- Your doctor cannot see it unless you share it. That is the category’s defining property, not a gap we can close.
- It cannot get documents you do not have. The subject access request is yours to make.
- It can misread. The reading is automated, so check anything that matters against the original. That is why every fact links back to it.
- It is not medical advice. It organises your information. It does not diagnose or tell you what to do.
If you look after children or a parent as well, I wrote a separate guide on managing family health records in Ireland, including what the law lets you see.
A reasonable starting point
If you want one concrete sequence: get a verified MyGovID, open the HSE Health App and see what is actually there. Ask your GP practice for a copy of your record. Ask any hospital or private clinic that treated you for theirs. Then put it all in one place you control.
The HSE’s layer and your own layer answer different questions. It is worth having both.
Sources
- HSE: the HSE Health App (launch, current features, work in progress and planned)
- HSE: about your HSE Health App (age 16, verified MyGovID, what you can see, gaps, own cards only)
- Department of Health: Digital for Care 2024-2030 (patient app, Shared Care Record, electronic health records)
- Health Information Act 2026, sections 1, 10 and 21
- GDPR (Regulation (EU) 2016/679), Articles 12 and 15 (right of access, timing, fees)
- HSE: data protection requests and HSE: Freedom of Information requests
- Data Protection Commission
Claims about the HSE Health App and Irish health records are sourced to the HSE, the Department of Health and the legislation, linked inline, and were checked on 9 November 2026. The HSE app changes often; this page will be updated as it does. This article is general information about software and how these systems work, not medical or legal advice.
