Some of you may have heard that the Polish healthcare system is moving away from paper prescriptions. The move towards digital ones is a gradual one, and although it’ll take until 2020 for the change to go global, the Ministry of Health has already decided to take things much further. Their newest effort aims to digitize the entire medical records of Polish patients in a move towards eHealth in the public sphere.
The project assumes the launch of a medical portal called the Patient’s Internet Account, would function like an online-based database. Each private profile is meant to contain a patient’s complete medical records, starting with the date of the account’s registration. Thanks to the application, a patient will get access to information about their prescriptions and provided benefits. It will also provide a variety of healthcare-related e-services. – stated Health Vice Minister Janusz Cieszyński.
Apart from making the entire process efficient for the patients, the ministry reasons that the digitization will also bring about sizable savings for the Healthcare sector. Moreover, the portal is designed to be transparent for the patients by showing the real costs of the received medical services. By introducing the feature into the Patient’s Internet Account, the Ministry hopes to raise the Poles’ awareness about the factual costs of healthcare.
The launch of the internet database isn’t the last step towards digitization the Ministry of Health has planned for the Polish system. After the e-prescriptions and the Patient’s Internet Account system goes into effect, we can also expect electronic orders for medical devices, and electronic sick leave notes. According to the Ministry, we can expect the changes to go into effect as soon as in July of this year.
Do you think the move towards the digitization of public healthcare is long overdue, or maybe you’re concerned about the privacy of medical records and you’d rather see things stay as they were? For further updates about the upcoming changes to the Public Health System, feel free to check out the Ministry of Health’s website.
