HealthManagement, Volume 10, Issue 2 /2008
The six health programme priorities of the Slovenian Ministry of Health are: health improvement and preventive activities; the formulation of national policies and strategies for enabling and promoting healthy lifestyles; healthcare; organisation of the healthcare system; healthcare financing and development of a model for monitoring and assessing quality in the healthcare system.
The ehealth objectives and activities are derived from the Action Plan for a European Ehealth Area and from experiences and current status of health informatics in Slovenia.
In December 2005 “Ehealth 2010 – Strategic plan for the Slovenian health sector informatisation” was published. It has three main activity lines:
-establish the basic informatics structure and define the basic health and social databases as a basis for the implementation of the national electronic health record by the end of 2007;
-interconnect health and social information systems on the national level through the development of the national health portal.
This portal will provide safe and reliable exchange of data between the relevant parties in the health system, will ensure eservices and transparent information to all relevant parties and could be connected to other similar systems across Europe by the end of 2010, and establish ebusiness as a common way of work in the Slovenian health sector by the end of 2010.
The National Health Informatics Council was established in June 2006, followed by the establishment of the Health Informatics Standardisation Board. The Health Informatics Council is the governing body that will ensure informatics is optimally applied in support of national health system goals.
A planned card system upgrade will be accomplished in the 2007-2009 period.
-the NETC@RDS project, between (among others) Czech Republic, Italy and Slovenia, to improve mobile citizens’ access to trans-European health services by using advanced web-oriented applications either based on IT systems, smart cards or combining both of them. It also aims to implement and evaluate technical solutions for electronic European Health Insurance Card and for improving additional services such as the inter- European health costs clearing and billing processing.
-the PRIMACOM project, collaboration between Hungary and Slovenia on exchange of medical data and experience with Italy and Denmark. It aims to supply healthcare professionals with systems and infrastructure which enhance communication between primary and secondary care. Another initiative is the NANSA project, which transfers distributed software technologies for open health, healthcare, hospital and insurance systems and adopted European standards to the CEE/NIS countries.
