The pandemic has emphasised the importance of electronic access to all health services. The condition to achieve this is the establishment of an eHealthRecord
Although at first glance you may not connect the healthcare sector with improving the business environment, the Grey Book has included more than a dozen recommendations related to healthcare in previous years. Since the breakout of the Covid-19 pandemic, the importance of improving healthcare procedures is no longer a mystery to anyone.
Now, three years after paper prescriptions have become a thing of the past thanks to ePrescriptions, there is no reason not to replace paper health records with electronic ones, so every doctor we visit, either in the state healthcare system or in private practice, will be a click away from all the data on your previous examinations, results and therapies. From there, we will be only a step away from further development of electronic healthcare in Serbia, which would ensure cheaper and more efficient solutions to the challenges people and companies face both in regular and crisis conditions.
Establishing electronic health records has rightfully been placed among the 10 priority NALED recommendations in the 13th edition of the Grey Book. It is one of many elements required for the strategic approach to the development of eHealthcare currently being prepared, since an initiative of the Healthcare Alliance prompted the government to form the Coordination Body for Healthcare Digitalisation, in which we will be working together on developing new electronic services.
Serbians spend 40% of their money in healthcare directly from their own pockets, among the highest percentages in Western Balkans, but that does not guarantee them the best service
It goes without saying that neither the eHealthRecord nor related services will be complete without integrating public and private healthcare sectors. Connecting the two systems is a longstanding Grey Book recommendation that now seems inevitable. Among other things it would enable more efficient use of taxpayers’ money. Private healthcare capacities available during the pandemic could have significantly reduced the strain on public hospitals and improved service quality.
To compete with the private sector, the public healthcare system must be optimised through improving the network plan and using available resources better. To this end the Grey Book also contains a recommendation for more efficient use of available funds by improving the centralised public procurement system.
At the start of the pandemic, the Healthcare Alliance gave a great contribution and support to the government. At the very beginning of the state of emergency in March, we suggested 15 urgent measures for healthcare, and in June we defined 10 additional measures to mitigate the negative effects of the pandemic.
We may have been somewhat prophetic, since having identified the need to modernise healthcare and prepare it for future challenges, we published the first special edition of the Grey Book of Healthcare in February last year. It contains 50 recommendations to reduce administrative obstacles faced by people and companies in the field of healthcare. The pandemic that broke out a month later forced institutions to place this publication high on their agenda.
