The General Medical Services (GMS) (Payments) Board in Ireland is the principal agency for Irish primary care reimbursement. All public health services provided by General Practitioners, Dentists, Pharmacists and Optometrists are reimbursed by the GMS, which has an annual budget of EUR 2.0B. The GMS has a policy of improving its services to and communications with its Primary Care clients, and this policy is described in the Board's ICT Strategy. One of the main planks of this ICT Strategy is the development of a business infrastructure for communications with clients, using web technology. I was therefore delighted when the GMS was invited to join the PICNIC Consortium, and I was even more pleased to be asked to be the Project Co-ordinator for the second phase of the project, from April 2001 to March 2003.

The development of leading edge technologies for deployment in healthcare for the benefit of patients and health professionals is at the core of the GMS' mission. Through the vehicle of the PICNIC project, we were able to combine our business knowledge with frontline thinking on the use of ICT to create future technology solutions for healthcare that could be deployed today. The GMS was one of the PICNIC pilot agencies, and we utilised W3C web technologies and HL7's Clinical Document Architecture protocols to build an online patient ID validation and Community Pharmacist reimbursement system. This system was prototyped under PICNIC, and was subsequently rolled-out to pharmacies all over Ireland.

One of the great features of the project was the opportunity to work with thought leaders and technology futurists from all over Europe. Our PICNIC partners from Crete (FORTH), Denmark (Funen), France (Minoru), Finland (VTT), together with many other health agencies, institutions and companies, helped us develop and deploy leading edge ICT solutions for supporting Primary Care. In particular I would also like to thank our fellow partners from Ireland, the North Western Health Board, South & East Belfast Community Trust, the Department of Health & Children (for chairing the National Health Advisory Board) and Hewlett Packard Ireland (which provided technology support).

Out of PICNIC came many ideas and specifications, which will contribute to the building of better systems for all those who work in healthcare throughout Europe. The challenge is for the European healthcare sector and the ICT market to take up these concepts and designs and use them to bring benefits to patients and practitioners.

I would like to thank the European Commission's Information Society Directorate for their support and patience, particularly our Project Officer, Yves Paindaveine, who brought the best out of us.

Patrick BURKE, Chief Executive, General Medical Services (Payments) Board, Republic of Ireland