Patient data must be combined in one place in health care, emphasized Alenka Kolar, Director General of the Directorate for Digitalization in Health Care at the Ministry of Health, on the sidelines of the German-Austrian Health Forum.
There is a huge amount of data available that is used for billing – this data must be “returned” to doctors and medical personnel so that they can make decisions based on it for the benefit of the patient, she emphasized in a press statement Alenka Kolar.
According to her, Austria also has similar problems to Slovenia, and in Germany they are already working on open platforms for data exchange, which is also the goal of the law on digitization of healthcare – i.e. to achieve that individual patient data is accessible in one place.
The proposal for this law is already in the parliamentary procedure. At the beginning of the month, it should have been considered by the parent committee of the DZ for health care, but the members of the committee voted to withdraw this item from the agenda at the proposal of the coalition.
Kolar explained that the ministry is correcting the law based on the comments of the legislative and legal service of the DZ, but they are also trying to take into account the other comments, or explain why they will not be taken into account. After that, the law will continue the parliamentary process, hopefully this year.
According to her, most of the corrections will be in the new company planned by law for the maintenance and development of the information system in healthcare. “You can’t create a company with a hundred employees in one month, you have to recruit them somehow, acquire them, teach them,” she warned.
Therefore, companies are now planning the introduction gradually. He reckons that in three to five years the company will have enough staff and competence to be able to “switched to central systems”she explained.
The law has the support of Prime Minister Golob
When asked whether the change at the head of the Ministry of Health could affect the draft law in any way, she replied that the draft law has the direct support of the Prime Minister Robert Golob and Svoboda MPs, the coalition SD and Left should also support him.
According to her, the ministry is also working hard in the area of waiting lists. The National Institute of Public Health is preparing improvements with software suppliers. Namely, the data is still not reliable, the biggest problems are the so-called tentative appointments, when the patient is only subsequently notified by the medical institution about the appointment of the service.
According to her, a universal review of waiting lists would offer an ordering schedule that would be uniform for the whole of Slovenia, which would be difficult to achieve, as doctors need different amounts of time for different patients. Therefore, it will be necessary to find a middle way, she emphasized.
German-Austrian Forum
At the German-Austrian health forum, which was organized in Ljubljana by Advantage Austria Ljubljana in cooperation with the Slovenian-German Chamber of Commerce, in addition to the digitization of health care, they also discussed personnel challenges in health care, examples of good practices, and the differences and similarities between health systems. Slovenia, Austria and Germany.
One of the speakers was Petra Došenović Bonča from the Faculty of Economics in Ljubljana, who told the media that care must be taken when introducing foreign practices into the Slovenian healthcare system, as each system is specific.
Among the obstacles that Slovenia has in the field of health care, in addition to the frequent changes of ministers of health, she pointed out the frequent changes of directors in the public health network. Often, however, there is a situation where one stakeholder in healthcare takes over the tasks of another, she explained. He also believes that it will be necessary to decide what will be in the health basket and stop promising people that they have access to all health services, because this is not possible because the budget is always limited.
Source: Rtvslo
