The Health Services Executive (HSE) regions and various connected agencies are using digital mapping technology that may eventually pave the way for a "health atlas" to determine the way Government funding is spent in the future.
Geographical information systems (GIS) integrate patient records, census information, locations and details of health services and other information into maps of the country to be displayed on a regular PC.
Users can then develop various solutions, such as where to build new health facilities to serve a spreading population, or if a high occurrence of infectious disease in one area is connected to identifiable environmental factors.
Although the service is only available to health workers, there is the possibility of developing an "internet health portal" which would be accessible to the public, said Eamonn Doyle of ESRI Ireland, which provides its ArcGIS suite to the HSE regions.
"The idea behind this is that the HSE will be able to find out what areas are most in need of particular services. If you can imagine it in a retail environment, it's like putting a new McDonald's nearest the biggest centre of population furthest from any other McDonald's," said Mr Doyle.
"Although there are no concrete plans at present, the logical conclusion for this process would be a website or phone line that the public could access, give their details and ask where the nearest pharmacy or GP is to them. A lot of people would recognise that we have lagged behind our counterparts in Europe, who have had these systems in place for a number of years.
"Before this I guess it was a case of pins in maps. I don't know if we didn't have as good quality data available, or if our address system was lacking as we have no postcodes, or if there were budgetary constraints and this wasn't top of the agenda."
The National Cancer Registry has been using GIS to build a map record of incidents of cancer by address information from patient records to show the geographical distribution of the various cancer types. This distribution can then be modelled to compare its pattern with that of other factors.
Dr Paul Walsh, an epidemiologist at the National Cancer Registry, said it was only beginning to scratch the surface of the possibilities. "We're currently geocoding all our patients which is a very slow process, because it's not just addresses alone - you have to match that to a county and an HSE region and electoral districts. So we're still in the middle of that but it's likely we will be using the GIS a lot more in the future when we have that completed," he said.
"There are some very sophisticated services. For example, you can look at a map of all the roads in the country and pick a particular address and a hospital and see how long it would take a patient to get to the hospital in rush hour or when the traffic is quiet.
"The downside is that it can be very complex. If you wanted to check up on a cluster of patients in a particular area, if you zoom in on the map there may be a lot of information cramped together in a salt and pepper fashion."