Digitization of patient health
14 January 2021
As recently as a few years ago a patient going to his or her doctor received a sick leave certificate as a paper document. Such a document had to be delivered within 7 days to the employer or ZUS headquarters, which was often very inconvenient. The modern, citizen-focused approach of the public administration translated into changes to the management procedures. This led to Poland introducing the obligation to issue sick leaves in electronic form from December 2018.
New practice
As a result of the mentioned procedural changes, one of our clients needed to adapt their existing platform of electronic services to the occurring legal changes.
The main objective of the cooperation was to simplify and automate the process of issuing sick leaves. We have achieved this goal by adding a module designed for doctors to the existing platform and mechanisms for generating medical certificates and authorization of issued documents. At the same time, we adapted the platform according to the requirements of the eIDAS regulation and fully integrated it with other used systems.
Benefiting the patient
The applied solutions helped to reduce patient service costs and speed up access to information. After less than a month of the system’s operation, more than 140,000 doctors set up their profiles in the system, 2.6 million active users used it and around 100,000 sick leaves were issued.
Sending your sick leave to your employer electronically ensures that it reaches the ZUS office on time and that you will receive appropriate sick pay. It also shortens the waiting period for the payment of the benefits.
Information about an employee’s sick leave reaches the employer on the day it is issued, and electronic records allow for effective control of sick leaves and monitoring of their proper use.
The healthcare market is increasingly willing and emboldened to take advantage of the opportunities offered by technology. All this to meet the growing expectations of patients and, as far as possible, carry out tasks digitally.
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