Ukraine has fully switched to electronic sick leave since October 1: how it works

In Ukraine, starting from October 1, all healthcare institutions will issue electronic sick leave. This was announced during a joint briefing by representatives of the Ministry of Digital Development, the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Social Policy and the Pension Fund. In June of this year, the transition stage of launching e-hospitals throughout Ukraine started. During this time, almost all Ukrainian hospitals were connected to the unified information medical system, which is about 3 thousand. In total, almost a million electronic medical reports were generated.

“Electronic sick leave is one of the most important steps towards a paperless regime in the healthcare sector. Digitalization helps reduce the burden on doctors and simplify the receipt of insurance payments for patients. After all, sick leave is one of the most popular services in Ukraine. They have been trying to reform them for almost 10 years. Thanks to joint work, this became possible — in just 4 months, almost every hospital in Ukraine began to issue electronic sick leave,” said Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of digital transformation of Ukraine Mykhailo Fedorov.

To effectively launch electronic sick leave, the Ministry of Digital Development, the Ministry of Health, the National Health Service and representatives of the MIS made several trainings and webinars for doctors on how to correctly form medical reports and disability certificates in electronic format and work with them.

“Electronic sick leave is a transparent, patient-friendly and accountable process for recording the provision of medical services and subsequent insurance payments. The patient will no longer have to waste their time on paperwork. To date, more than 1.1 million electronic medical reports on temporary disability have already been created in 2,991 institutions by 47 thousand doctors”, said Health Minister Viktor Liashko.

E-sick leave will be divided into two parts. A medical report is a document after a doctor's examination that contains a general diagnosis. The doctor creates it in the Register and certifies it with an electronic signature. You will receive an SMS message about this. From there, in a few seconds, the sick leave is included in the Register of the Pension Fund. And there an electronic disability certificate is formed — this is exactly the document by which payments are calculated. You will also receive a message about this on your phone, already from the PFU. The employer will be able to view your sick leave on the PFU portal.

Minister of social policy Maryna Lazebna said: “E-sick leave is a step towards people. Until today it was necessary to collect a lot of certificates and seals, but the new system eliminates all difficulties for a person. Registers exchange information with each other without papers. From now on, doctors treat, people recover, employers see that employees are on sick leave from the first day, documents are processed automatically, and a person receives payments without unnecessary delays”.

The information contained in the medical report is signed by the doctor personally with an electronic signature. This means that the health worker is fully responsible for the data that he enters there. An attempt to fake them — for example, to give a sick leave to a person who was not ill — can lead to the deprivation of a doctor’s or even an institution’s medical license. This will be monitored by employees of the Social Insurance Fund.

“Electronic disability certificates are generated automatically, which is convenient for Ukrainians. There is no longer any need to collect information and stand in queues. This will speed up the process of receiving payments. In addition, everyone will be able to check information about themselves in their personal account on the web portal of the Pension Fund of Ukraine. Due to this, the process will become more open, and corruption risks will decrease”, said Yevhen Kapinus, Chairman of the Board of the Pension Fund of Ukraine.

The project is implemented by the Ministry of Digital Development together with the Ministry of Health of Ukraine, the National Health Service, the Ministry of Social Policy, The Social Insurance Fund, PFU and with the support of the EGAP program implemented by the Eastern Europe Foundation and funded by Switzerland.