Blaskovits: e-Health Launch Not End of World

Bratislava, December 18 (TASR) – The beginning of 2018, when the electronic health-care service, the so-called e-Health, is set to be launched in Slovakia, doesn’t mean the end of the world, stated head of the National Centre for Health Information (NCZI) Peter Blaskovits at a press conference on Monday.

“January 1, 2018 isn’t the date of a big bang or of anything else,” he said.

The launch of e-Health has been openly criticised mainly by outpatient doctors, who’ve asked for the service to be postponed.

Blaskovits at the press conference stated that e-Health will significantly contribute towards improving health care and thus boosting the quality of people’s lives. “It provides important information about people’s health, which is invaluable in terms of fast access, especially in life-threatening situations, but also for providing ordinary health care,” said Blaskovic.

The NCZI head added that e-Health’s most useful measures are eExamination and ePrescription. The former should replace patients’ paper medical records. Individual examinations will be carried out without the need to record them on paper and print the notes out, as is the case at the moment. Doctors will create an online record from their patients’ examinations, and patients will then be able to see the records in an electronic health book on the National Health Site website (www.npz.sk).

In addition to eExamination, prescribing drugs should also be done electronically. Doctors will thus be able to see what drugs have been prescribed to a patient by other doctors.

As many as 3,500 outpatient doctors, 71 hospitals and polyclinics are currently connected to the eHealth system. The goal is connect all hospitals and pharmacies to the system by the end of this year. At the same time Blaskovits reassured doctors that in 2018 the state won’t sanction providers who fail to join the system.