New queue monitoring tool - an interactive display panel
The Ministry of Health, in cooperation with the National Health Insurance Fund (NHIF) and the State Data Agency (SDA), has created a new tool to monitor waiting queues for doctors' appointments. The display panel, which shows data from the Preliminary Patient Registration (PPR) information system, will allow monitoring the dynamics of queues and identifying problems, as well as monitoring the effectiveness of the impact measures taken.
The Minister of Health Arūnas Dulkys says that the benefits of the new display panel are quite diverse: it will allow citizens to navigate to the shortest queues, to which medical institutions they can go for consultations, and it will provide health policy makers with a tool that will allow them to make data-based decisions.
“A lock is appearing that unlocks perhaps the biggest flaw in today's healthcare system - queues. Until now, queuing statistics have been based on data provided by the healthcare institutions themselves, but now we will have a true picture of the situation in healthcare institutions. The display panel will allow data-driven decisions to be made, identifying problem areas such as the availability of services at specific medical institutions, opening of doctors' hours, shortage of doctors in specific specialisations,” says the Minister of Health Arūnas Dulkys.
The display panel is available online by following the link: https://osp.stat.gov.lt/pacientu-eiles
The display panel will allow to objectively identify the specialists, the personal health care institutions, and the regions with the longest queues. The Ministry of Health and the NHIF will analyse this information and target impact measures (reimbursement of targeted services, prioritisation of facilities that are able to provide more services, etc.). The display panel will also allow monitoring whether certain measures are reducing queues.
The new display panel is continuously updated and based on real data from the PPR information system on registrations and visits to doctors. For the full functionality of the display panel, all healthcare institutions must be connected to it. They should also provide all consultation times, which of the most important things to make the display panel operational is to work actively with medical institutions.
Until now, the NHIF has been monitoring the queues by collecting data on the waiting lists of patients from medical institutions once a month. These data were not sufficiently objective and accurate and only reflected the situation on one day of the month.
Currently, one in ten patients register appointments with specialists through the PPR information system (www.esveikata.lt), and healthcare institutions register a proportion of their visits there. Looking at the last three months, 14.4% of primary care services and 47.4% of specialised healthcare services covered by the Compulsory Health Insurance Fund were registered through the PPR information system. Due to the representativeness of this volume of data, the data on waiting times to appointments should be interpreted with caution for the time being. The data will be evaluated once a sufficient sample has been secured, as the current data represent only a small part of the availability of treatment services to the population.
To encourage healthcare institutions to register patients through the PPR information system, the Ministry of Health initiated meetings with representatives of institutions and municipalities. During the meetings, the already completed and planned development works of the system were presented, and issues of concern to the system users were discussed. According to the Ministry of Health’s assessment, the meetings were useful, as a significant increase in the use of the PPR information system by institutions has been observed since November 2022. In the last quarter of last year, the declaration of visits in the system increased more than threefold in primary care and more than twofold in specialised care.
Currently, the PPR system is fully or almost fully used in primary care by Kelme District Mental Health Centre, Sirvintos District Primary Health Care Centre, Panevezys City Dental Clinic, Kalvarija Primary Health Care Centre and Veiveriai Primary Health Care Centre, In specialised care - Svencionys District Hospital, Orthopaedic Services Clinic, Kedainiai Hospital, Mykolas Marcinkevičius Hospital, Pasvalys Hospital, Klaipeda University Hospital branch Seamen‘s Hospital, Vilkaviskis Hospital, Birzai Hospital, and other institutions.
Press Office of Ministry of Health
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Last updated: 06-03-2023
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