The round of one-day training seminars on the introduction of an electronic system for the management of primary healthcare institutions (PHC), including PHC of hromadas, is actively carried out in Ukraine.

Dates of the upcoming events:

21 November – Cherkasy (the Cherkasy and Kirovohrad Oblasts)
23 November – Rivne (the Rivne and Volyn Oblasts)
30 November – Dnipro (the Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhya Oblasts)

Seminars are held by the representatives of the e-Health Project Office under the Ministry of Health. The round is sponsored by the U-LEAD with Europe programme and the EDGE project funded by the Canadian Government.

The implementation of the e-Health electronic healthcare system is part of  the healthcare system modernisation, including improvement of the delivery of services. On the other hand, it is an important part of the new healthcare financing mechanism.

Primary healthcare institutions will receive compensation for the provided healthcare services based on the number of patients who have concluded declarations with the doctors of these institutions (per capita standard).

The electronic healthcare system will become mandatory from August 2018, therefore the primary task is to train medical personnel to use the electronic system and inform people so that they can choose their doctors. The goal of the events is to start a constructive dialogue with the primary healthcare workers, who will directly implement the central component of the eHealth programme on the ground, namely, the chief physicians of hospitals, primary healthcare professionals, family doctors, etc.

During the seminar, Svitlana Kotlyarevsk,  expert of the e-Health Project Office, presents the central component of the e-Health electronic healthcare system and the stages of its launch, explain how to register a doctor and Declaration. Particular attention is paid to the legal basis for the implementation of the e-Health electronic system.

Olena Reshetnyak and Mykhaylo Dovhopol, experts of the Kharkiv Expert Group in Healthcare Reform, highlight the new role of the chief physician within the autonomy of healthcare institutions. Participants are informed on comparative analysis of the monthly budget of the primary healthcare centre based on the "red" and "green" patient lists, the challenges in the new funding system and the new roles of administrators.

At the end of the seminar, the developers of the healthcare information systems (HIS) from the private sector in cooperation with the MOH present their electronic products, and the healthcare institutions have the opportunity to choose additional HIS that are compatible with the e-Health system on the market.

The first seminar of this series was held on 17 October in Bakhmut. More than 100 chief physicians from the primary healthcare centres of the Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts took part in it. 9 seminars have been held so far with the participation of the specialists from the Kharkiv, Poltava, Sumy, Vinnytsya, Khmelnytskyi, Odesa, Mykolayiv, Lviv, Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivsk and Chernivtsi Oblasts. The number of participants exceeded expectations, and sometimes the availability of the ordered meeting rooms – for example, people in Lviv and Vinnytsya were staying having no available seats to take.

The participants of the seminars were interested in the timetable for implementation of the e-Health system, the parameters of the necessary computer equipment, and the cost of usage of the healthcare information systems (HIS). Many issues concerned the primary healthcare reform, i.e. whether family doctors will be made redundant and how the primary healthcare will be funded if the patients are not in time to sign their Declarations with the doctors?