Country profile: Slovakia

The Slovak health care system is predominantly centralized and based on a mandatory social health insurance system. Slovak health policy is decided on a national level and the main authority is the Ministry of Health. Partial roles related to health policy are assigned to the National Health Information Centre, the Public Health Authority of the Slovak Republic and the State Institute for Drug Control. Health care is provided through the network of healthcare institutions and individual practitioners located in the districts. The observance of correct courses of treatment in health care provision is supervised by the Health Care Surveillance Authority.

ICT use and eHealth strategy

In Slovakia, the use of ICT in the health sector is below average. While many GPs use a computer during patient consultations and decision support systems are accessed regularly, a considerable number of them do not have Internet access, especially not to broadband. While storage and transfer of administrative data is common practice, the transfer of medical data is mainly undertaken between health care providers and health insurance companies.

Slovakia has made great efforts to implement eHealth throughout the country. The National Health Information Centre, established in 2006 has been entrusted with tasks involving health informatics, statistics, standards and a medical library. In 2008, when the Ministry of Health set up a new eHealth strategy, the National Health Information Centre was nominated to be in charge of the Slovak eHealth Program and acted as controller for eHealth.

The Slovak eHealth Program has been planned for five years until 2013 and could be extended until 2018. The program consists of three phases and the eHealth services were developed in an iterative and incremental way.

The key factors of the future eHealth solutions are:

• Citizens and their health
• Security
• Accountability
• Scalability
• User friendly environment
• Productivity
• Consistency
• Interoperability with the European Union.

The key pillars of the Slovak eHealth Program comprise the following four strategic objectives:

• Creation of a legislative and regulatory framework for eHealth
• Creation of a secure infrastructure for implementing the vision and mission of eHealth
• Implementation of ICT to support the processes and services of a health system funded by public resources
• Support the rise of new processes and forms of health care and medical services.

The Slovak eHealth Program will deliver an integrated set of eHealth services. These services are grouped in the following application domains:

• Allocation domain services (eBooking, eReferral, eWaiting list, eReminder, eLaboratory, eVaccination, eCalendar)
• National Health Portal services (eHealth information, eLearning, eHealth forum, eWarning, eLibrary)
• Citizen’s health eBook services (insuree account, EDS, PHR, PACS, eGenomics)
• Prescription domain services (ePrescription, eMedication, eDispensation, ePharmacy, eStatistics)
• Telemedicine domain services (Tele-consilium, Tele-monitoring, Tele-care, Tele-consulting).

One of the main challenges of the Slovak eHealth Program is the introduction of numerous services in parallel. In response, the program management structures and program office were set up at the National Health Information Centre.

Legal framework

So far, Slovakia has not yet implemented eHealth legislation. There are few legal provisions related to health records in electronic form, but there is no legislation handling the entire scope of eHealth. The process of amending the legal framework in order to permit the full implementation of eHealth solutions will be sequential and tied up with the program phases. The starting point for the Slovak eHealth legislation will be eGovernment legislation as well as corresponding EU directives.

If you want to know more about Health Care in Slovakia, please click here. For more information about the Slovak eHealth Program, please see the digital
eHealth brochure.