Croatia is a small country is central Europe bordering the Adriatic Sea with a population of 4.4 million. To provide services to the citizens, there are 61 hospitals, 2337 general practitioners, 1961, dental practices, 1117 pharmacies, and 143 laboratories.
In general, health care is mainly satisfactory with better accessibility to healthcare facilities in major cities. The range of health services rendered in remote areas and islands is less, but still within acceptable boundaries.
There are several problems in treating the country’s population. One issue is that there are many elderly people in very sparse rural areas that aren’t able to travel long distances and in general the population is not really mobile and travel is not easy for many to do.
Keynote speaker Sinisa Varga, DMD, Minister of Health www.zdravlje.hr/en/mimnistry in the Republic of Croatia described healthcare in his country at the 2014 mhealth Summit www.mhealthsummit.org held December 7-10 at the Gaylord Convention Center in the Washington D.C area. He explained that eHealth development is the number one priority in the country.
Varga told the Summit attendees that in Croatia, many doctors fill prescriptions using e-prescribing each year, the e-waiting system is used to help reduce the time it takes to get appointments, and e-referral checklists are used to send patients to other places for further treatment.
Today, mHealth is integrated into the health system and is an integral part of ehealth focusing on the elderly, on chronic diseases, such as diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity, COPD, and heart health issues.
Nurses in the field in Croatia use mHealth devices to enable information to go into EHRs. The nurses send their patients’ blood for testing to a remote center for analysis and effectively communicate with their patients at a distance by using messaging, sending questionnaires back and forth, and sending other educational materials to remote patients.
Strategic objectives are in place for the future to:
- Have at least one hospital redesign project completed in 2015
- Publish a list of the most successful hospitals
- Establish central procurement/framework agreements for purchases of medical supplies, medicinal products and devices for hospital services, with the need for these products to be published on the Ministry of Health’s web site
- Have 50 percent of all primary healthcare doctors in Croatia provide their services in group practices by 2015
In the near future, it is also hoped that e-invoice systems will be available to help practices and hospitals. Also, on tap for the near future, it is anticipated that e-medical device reporting and e-newborn registry will be put in place.
As for public health, the Ministry of Health plans to:
- Establish public health standards, norms, and indicators
- Develop a network of county health promotion teams and establish a public health activity network linked to CEZIH and organized systems in other sectors
- Establish a preventive activities management system
- Establish system to monitor, evaluation, control and prevent health risks determined by environmental factors
- Develop an early warning and response system to handle health threats and link to the European Commission