The system, developed by the Estonian e-Health Foundation, simplifies the patient’s registration process for doctor appointments and makes medicine shopping easier. The cross-country e-registration system gives the list of all the doctors and health services around Estonia so the patient can choose the most convenient one and provides patient information exchange for doctors.
We’re so used to living with e-everything that we talk about an e-police, e-government, e-state, e-school, e-health care, and the list goes on and on. But several dangers lurk behind all that e-existence. All these IT solutions are marvellous, to be sure: they save time and money, spare our nerves and plenty else as well. But they can also prove dangerous when the means become ends in themselves. What becomes crucial then, for e-government, is the e-connection, which has nothing whatever to do with the substance or quality of actual governance.
The Estonian Social Ministry demands that in two months, all pharmacies have to have transitioned to the new digital prescriptions system and then the medical doctors will no longer be allowed to issue prescriptions on paper. At the moment though, the technical digital prescriptions system still has flaws and most doctors and pharmacies have not even tested it as yet.
Read more: Estonian pharmacies fear chaos from digital prescriptions
The European Commission organised a contest for determining the projects that best support the implementation of the EU eGovernment strategy. The ‘Best Practices’ title was granted to the paper-free documents exchange project submitted by the State Chancellery.
Read more: Estonia’s paper-free bureaucracy received a high-level award
The Estonian Association of Information Technology and Telecommunications (ITL) is one of the organizations that work with the central administration to achieve this goal and, according to its president, Taavi Kotka, “the IT Agency is extremely important for Estonia. Creating it here would be the bests help ever for the whole Estonian IT sector. Estonia would nicely manage to build it up”.
Read more: Government Works to Bring the EU IT Agency to Estonia