General practitioners have to face an unpleasant situation in Romania since the first of July: the national healthcare system’s information platform broke down and as a result healthcare services, drug and medical aid inscriptions have to be conducted in offline mode until the problem is solved, the National Health Insurance Fund (CNAS) on its website.
The too frequent technical breakdowns make it much harder and slow down general practitioners work, because they can’t activate patients healthcare cards, and they are not able to write electronic prescriptions and referrals either.
The National Alliance of the Family Doctors (SNMF) says that this is not the only problem of the Romanian health care system, just the most prominent issue with the communications system between healthcare providers, health insurance companies and patients. And because of this debugging the IT system would be both very urgent and important.
“The biggest problem is that the service providers are not able to check whether the patients turning to them have health insurance or not? Patients also might have to wait more at the doctor’s office for the prescriptions, or for their drugs at the pharmacies.”
pharmacist Pál Székely, Vice-President of the Hargita County Pharmaceutical Chamber told news portal székelyhon.ro . He also added that due to this problem some pharmacies don’t give out at all the free and subsidized drugs to the clients, but this is not typical. In general the patients can get their drugs, but have to wait longer than usual.
According to general practitioners, in the past two weeks the healthcare information system had been only working on a 10% level, which made their work much more difficult, and created an uncomfortable situation also for the patients. The CNAS says they are working on the problem in order to solve it as soon as possible.
Title image: Reading of a health care card in a family doctor’s office (Photo: nyugatijelen.com)
