Slovenia’s Digital Healthcare: The Road Ahead

Author: Anze Droljc, Director of Business Development

IN SLOVENIA, WE CAN BE PROUD OF THE ACHIEVEMENTS IN E-HEALTH ON A NATIONAL LEVEL

We have entirely digitised ePrescriptions, eReferrals, comprehensive patient summary, and interoperability backbone, enabling medical teams across all levels of care to always have the latest patient information available. < 2 Mio individuals have at least one record in the Patient summary, and there are already 51 Mio structured and unstructured records stored.

The modular and open data-driven backbone infrastructure has enabled Slovenia to implement in 2 weeks a centralised and real-time:

• collection of COVID-19 screening results,
• automatic SMS notifications to individuals reducing the need for manual calls,
• automated reporting to the national database on infectious diseases for epidemiologicalmonitoring,
• information on positive patients is available to healthcare providers as a time-limited alertthrough the Patient summary document.

Like many western countries, Slovenia is facing the challenge of an aging population and an increase of patients with one or more chronic conditions. To successfully address the increasing complexity of people’s health experience, needs, health inequalities, and unnecessary admissions to hospitals, Slovenia will have to implement new models of care that shift from treating for illness to focus on prevention, wellbeing, and value-based care, which is designed around individuals’ needs, rather than around separate organisations and with focus on prevention.

“Slovenia will have to implement new models of care that shift from treating for illness to focus on prevention, wellbeing, and value-based care”

To be successful in this transformation, more emphasis is needed on digital transformation and tighter collaboration of health and care providers connecting them into a national integrated care system (ICS) similar to good practices in the UK, Finland, and other developed countries.

The ambitious digital transformation that needs to happen will only be possible if we will setup a data-driven digital health platform that will enable different stakeholders from health & care teams to patients to easily and rapidly assemble user friendly and fit for purpose apps and solutions that will seamlessly and securely share and use not just the patient data but also patient pathways, decision support, AI, …