Centre of Registers continues to stabilise the operation of the eHealth system

The Centre of Registers, which maintains the eHealth system, continues to stabilise the system and proposes a systemic approach to its further development. The eHealth stabilisation plan has been developed and presented last week to the Ministry of Health, the owner of the system, which includes short and long-term actions to ensure the optimal operation of the system and to meet the expectations of users.

“As the main operator of the eHealth system, we see and hear daily complaints and expectations of the system users – mostly medical professionals. Unfortunately, the system’s size, its complexity and many integrations with other information systems do not allow us to develop and improve it as quickly and flexibly as we would like. We are working on various improvements every day, but a more serious breakthrough requires a systemic approach and concrete joint decisions and actions”, said Domantas Ozerenskis, Head of the eHealth Division at the Centre of Registers.

Proposed reordering of priorities

To mitigate the risks of eHealth incidents related to system errors, inconvenience for users and slowdowns or system failures, the Centre of Registers proposes to focus on several aspects: re-prioritisation of the development of existing and planned functionalities, repayment of the technological debt and additional measures for the management of integrators who maintain the systems used by healthcare institutions.

“Last week, we have stabilised the eHealth system – the speed is optimal, the database load is under control, so from a systemic point of view, users are not experiencing any performance problems. Obviously, we hear comments from doctors about certain aspects of using the system, and we always try to accommodate them. We are also continuously working to promptly fix individual functional errors identified. In near future, we are planning to optimise e-prescription and patient data submission enquiries, which should further improve the system’s speed”, added D. Ozerenskis.

Software changes and bug fixes carried out

Over the past week, the team of specialists at the Centre of Registers has implemented several software changes that have corrected identified system errors or introduced innovations. For example, bugs in the specialist portal have been fixed; changes have been made to the medical record form; bugs in the allergy and remote pharmacy functionalities have been corrected; and the interface for the pharmaceutical form with package selection has been introduced. 

As a reminder, at the beginning of November, a major upgrade of eHealth system was carried out – the technological part of the system was upgraded, and several new functionalities, related to the provision of outpatient care services at home, e-prescription filling and correction, exchange of data on pregnant women, mothers and newborns, etc., were introduced. The eHealth system has not been technologically updated in any significant way for more than 10 years, and its development in the current context is particularly challenging. Large-scale upgrades carried out by the Centre of Registers were not limited to the central eHealth system. At the same time, Softdent, the developer of one of the Foxus integration systems, carried out the installations. The institutions should upgrade the remaining integration systems in the next six months.

The eHealth system is the largest and most complex system in the country – it currently connects almost 3,000 healthcare institutions operating in the country, over 1,000 pharmacies, the system handles about 5 million requests per hour from 16,000 different IP addresses. The system currently has more than 500 terabytes of data and is supplemented with about 400,000 electronic documents every day, including 100,000 e-prescriptions alone.

The eHealth system involves the integration of information systems of the country’s healthcare institutions, so the uninterrupted functioning of the whole system depends not only on the central eHealth system, but also on the maturity level of the integration of the information systems of the healthcare institutions in the broad network of eHealth users.