Health Systems in Transition - Hungary - World Health Organization ...

114
Health systems in transition Hungary
also to providers. The current government IT strategy, now coordinated by the
Ministry of National Development, aims to improve IT capacities in the health
system. Some of the initiatives of the 2003 plan – such as the establishment
of electronic prescribing and medical records, and the creation of systematic
mechanisms to keep registration databases updated and transparent – were
not implemented. The new action plan will put them into practice, along with
other initiatives that include, for instance, the horizontal integration of provider
IT systems in order to increase interoperability and to reinforce patient data
transfer between providers, starting in the second quarter of 2011 (Ministry of
National Development, 2010).
Regarding the current level of IT use in primary care, a study of the
European Commission based on 2007 survey data ranked Hungarian family
doctors as solid average performers among EU countries with regard to eHealth
utilization. They ranked ahead of all central and eastern European countries
except Estonia. Almost all family doctors in Hungary regularly used IT to store
administrative and medical files, but effective IT solutions (for example, for
transferring lab results or for electronic prescriptions) are not in use due to a lack
of technical prerequisites. Only 35.7% of primary care physicians in Hungary
had broadband internet access in 2007, which was well below the European
average (47.9%). They used their computers for consultation purposes (84%)
and to access decision support systems (93%), but were reluctant to develop
practice web sites. Indeed, only 9% of primary care physicians in Hungary had
a web site for their practice in 2007, which was one of the lowest rates in the
EU (European Commission & Empirica, 2008).
4.2 Human resources
4.2.1 Health workforce trends
As can be seen in Fig. 4.5, Hungary had 3.1 active physicians per 1000 population
in 2008. This was higher than the figure for Poland and the EU12 average, but
below those for the EU27, EU15, the Czech Republic and Austria. Although
the per capita number of physicians in Hungary in 2008 appears in the figure
to be no higher than it was a decade earlier, frequent changes in data collection
methodology and in the organization responsible for updating the registration
database make it difficult to analyse trends with any precision. Between 2000