Kazakhstan pilots e-health passports

25 July, 2019 16:32

In the wake of Digital Kazakhstan Program, many sectors of the Kazakh economy, including health, have been actively working on digitalization. As the Kazakh Health Minister stated the process toward digitalization in the health sector largely aims at greater access to and quality of medical services and supplies.

This week has seen the launch of e-health passports jointly with other government bodies, providing each citizen with access to their medical records via the electronic government website. Such passports allow to see the medical organizations a citizen used to go, free prescriptions a patient used to get.

“Digitalization is about implementing a system of social medical insurance in the long run as it is the only tool to bring in transparency,” said the Kazakh Health Minister.

The minister stressed that information systems had been developing by the Ministry for many years to record patients, medicines and switch to paperless workflow in hospitals. All the data were accumulated in different systems and on separate servers. So, the goal was to make each citizen see, control and access their data.

He also emphasized that e-health passports would be available in mobile shortly so as each citizen will be able to keep an eye on their medical records.

Now, e-health passports run in a pilot mode, but after the new year all the records will be updated online, that is, every visit to a hospital will be reflected on such e-health passports. This primarily serves to ensure transparency in the costs of the State.

Almost every hospital and polyclinic providing free medical services has to keep medical records in an electronic format, further being integrated on the platform helping to form e-passports.

“Thanks to the job done we [the Ministry] not only can optimize the work of hospitals, reduce paper bureaucracy as well as costs, but also record medical services and medicines provided,” he added.

Last year digitalization enabled to save considerable 26 billion tenge on online purchases via the Finance Ministry’s website, thanks to open trading. The savings were gone to buy some scarce medicines. A personalized approach toward beneficiaries with over 3 million prescriptions each year enabled to save medicines for around 14 billion tenge. The overall saving was around 50 billion tenge within the year.

Author: Adlet Seilkhanov

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