Platform for Primary Health appointments heralded by minister

The activation of the new platform for Primary Health appointments according to the standards of emvolio.gov.gr is just a few weeks away, as revealed by the Minister of State and Digital Government, Mr. Kyriakos Pierrakakis, speaking at the OT Forum. In fact, as he noted, the vaccination platform is an acquis that will be used in general in the health system, gradually reaching the country’s hospitals.

“The vaccination platform is an acquis. As we have said from the beginning, it actually exceeds the vaccine. It shows more or less what we want in everything. “On the one hand, this platform will be used in the health system in general”, said the minister, emphasizing that the culture of digital appointments with which the citizens became acquainted will be used to change the state as a whole.

Mr. Pierrakakis set preventive medicine as the next step, whish of course is a big bet. “We have an excellent register, the prescription register. For each AMKA citizen health number we have a prescription history of about a decade. We can do this, always with respect for privacy issues and with the consent of the citizen, to join it with free exam referrals and to be able to send notifications to anyone registered in the system for specific exams depending on age or health profile, resulting from the system.”

Regarding the response of the citizens to the new digital services of the State, as Mr. Pierrakakis said, “out of the 8.8 million digital transactions that we had in 2018, that is, then to put it simply we had 8.8 million visits to public services that were not undertaken. In 2021, 567 million digital transactions took place. This means that each of our fellow citizens has escaped about 60 queues a year from this process.”

He focused on the fact that more than half of these transactions did not concern a certificate, but cases where the state itself, with the digital authorization of the citizen, extracted only data from a database.

“Digitization does not mean change of procedures. The point is to change the way they were designed decades ago. These were not designed with a focus on the citizen, but on every state service that brought suggestions to the respective ministers for legislation”, the minister commented, emphasizing that the goal is “for the processes to focus on citizens.”

Asked about the next digital services that will be immediately available to the public, Mr. Pierrakakis, after referring to the possibility that was activated yesterday for the declaration of newborn naming and baptism, said that the platform for real estate transfers will start immediately. “Greece is last in the OECD in the unnecessary bureaucracy they entail. Today, for a property transfer, 17 certificates are needed, even when the property is tidy and cadastral”, he noted, clarifying that this will be solved to a large extent, changing part of the existing procedure, such as what will happen with the tax and insurance information.

Today, gov.gr, the digital portal of the Greek State, which started at the beginning of the pandemic with 531 services, includes close to 1,400 digital processes. As the minister characteristically said, “this is the numerator, we do not know who the denominator is, that is, how many are all the procedures of the State. Now we are counting these procedures and that is because what I can not measure I can not reform.”

Characterizing gov.gr as a basic reform, Mr. Pierrakakis stressed that the small changes that are made every day are the snowflakes, which will become an avalanche and will eventually change the Greek state. An important tool in this direction is the Recovery Fund, “a Marshall Fund for our time,” as he called it, “which enables us to achieve not what is possible, but what is necessary.”