Part 2. Healthcare.
In health care, as in all other spheres of life, it is necessary to introduce digitalization. This will make life easier for citizens and doctors when they come into contact with medical institutions, and will make it possible to make the right management decisions at the local and national level.
As you know, 15 years ago the government announced that all polyclinics in the country would be digitized. Any citizen of our country, no matter where he lives, no matter what clinic he visits, will have his digital medical passport in a single database, which will store all of his health history from birth to death and all of his visits to doctors, all the prescriptions that doctors have given him, all the tests, examinations, and so on.
This should ideally have been the case a long time ago, but it hasn’t been done yet. In order for such a database to exist and function, it is necessary that all medical institutions in the country have information systems into which all of the above information can be entered, and these information systems must be connected to the central state database
At the moment, it turns out that about 90% of state outpatient clinics are equipped with the Damumed medical information system. Several years ago I raised the issue that this dominant position of one company was unfair and unjustified. There is ample evidence that “Damumed” was introduced through pressure from various heads of medical departments at various levels. There have even been attempts to pressure private clinics to all use the information system. Several alternative programs such as MedElement and others have tried to fight this state of affairs, but they have failed. As the saying goes, “We’re still here,” even though several health ministers have been replaced.
How should this case have been organized ideally?
The Ministry of Health should have developed and made public the technical requirements for medical information systems. After that, it should have allowed all private developers to create their own information systems that meet these requirements, including the security of personal data of the country’s citizens. At the same time, the Ministry was to create a small software product with the sole function of receiving from all private information systems the necessary data on clinics, hospitals, doctors and patients for statistics and for government decision-making. After that, the Ministry was to declare open access to all private developers of software products to the country’s polyclinics. Polyclinics were to hold open tenders to select information systems and install those that suited them in terms of price and quality.
The diversity of information systems across the country would in no way disrupt the single information space, since all software products would be integrated with the central database in the ministry and would transmit all necessary information to it.
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