Estonia, Legislation, Markets and Companies, Medicine, Technology

Among the e-solutions created by the state in the healthcare sector, only the digital prescription system is actively used as it has been launched in the full planned scope. Use of digital medical history and digital pictures has been modest as doctors and hospitals don’t submit enough data there and it is used rarely. Digital registration hasn't been launched in the five years that has passed since it was completed, mainly because of the tepid interest of hospitals and medical centres to have such a centred online registration possibility.

Thus the data in the e-health system cannot be used comprehensively for treatment work, conducting state statistics, keeping registries or supervision.

The audit concluded that the digital prescription was successful because the Health Insurance Fund itself was interested in it being implemented, they focused only on one big project till it was implemented. It helped that as many standard solutions as possible were used.

Estonian E-health Foundation has worked on the other e-health projects like digital medical history, digital registration and digital pictures.

The State Audit Office estimates that the weak launch of e-health is caused by social ministry's lack of purpose and random activities in developing and implementing e-health. The office claimed that social ministry that should protect the state's interests, has been more an onlooker in managing e-health while representatives of healthcare institutions have been much more active and at their initiative, additional services were developed that has taken way the focus and money from the main projects.

Creating and implementing e-health has been much more expensive than planned – 15 mln euros instead of 2.8 mln and it isn’t known how much more money is needed to get the created systems to work.