Filenews 25 April 2023 - by Marilena Panayi
The way chronic patients are treated in the GHS is changing. Within the week, the HIO will put in place special arrangements in the system's software and personal doctors will be asked to divide their patients into categories and include them in patient registries depending on the condition they treat. At the same time, the HIO is preparing to proceed in the near future with new arrangements under which some groups of seriously ill patients will be exempted from the obligation to obtain a referral to visit the specialist doctor who treats them, while very soon and after patient registries are compiled and data are processed, other exceptions will follow, which may concern the way of obtaining medicines or the issuance of referrals for specific specialized examinations.
At the same time, a new arrangement is coming this week for all beneficiaries who will now be informed immediately after the registration of a visit by their personal doctor in the GHS software, so that they know how many of the visits they are entitled to each year they have used so far.
With these arrangements, which are not the only ones that will be implemented in the coming months, the HIO, according to senior officer Monica Kyriakou, aims "to facilitate beneficiaries who really need health services and at the same time to slowly begin to tidy up the system in order to normalize the situation for the benefit of all citizens". Some of the actions that the organization will proceed with by the end of the year, will help, among other things, in better management of waiting times for receiving services from citizens and in the better organization of doctors themselves.
Specifically, tomorrow, unless unexpected, the HIO will inform personal doctors about the start of the process of compiling patient registries. In practice, this means that personal doctors will be asked to follow a specific procedure in the GHS software in order to inform the system about which of their patients face chronic diseases such as diabetes, thalassemia, cancer, etc.
"In the first phase, the compilation of patient registries will help to better organize and plan the doctors themselves. A doctor, for example, when he knows that a patient suffers from diabetes, will be able to organize appointments with him, schedule his examinations and generally facilitate both himself and his beneficiary", said Mrs. Kyriacou and continued, "in a second phase and after the patient registries have been compiled (and after following the necessary procedures through the Board of Directors of the Organization) first, We will move on to some other arrangements. One of them will be to exempt specific groups of chronic patients from the obligation to issue a referral for specialists. The start will be made with thalassaemia and oncology patients who will gain direct access to the specialist doctors who monitor them and will not need a referral from their personal doctor. For oncology patients, this will be the case when they are in the process of being treated." In this way, Mrs. Kyriacou said, "personal doctors will also be relieved and our patients will be facilitated." Similar exemptions will then be given to other patient groups such as dialysis, transplant recipients, etc. Once these two phases have been completed, the HIO will proceed with the processing of its data in order to promote further changes regarding chronic patients that will be related to some of the restrictions currently in force in the GHS and have to do with either the prescription of medicines, the referral to specific tests, etc.
"This effort, which will now be implemented and implemented, aims to improve the way chronic patients are managed, who are the people who need more health services without delays and unnecessary suffering," Kyriacou said. "The process of changes and the integration of new regulations is and will be continuous since the aim of the organization is to facilitate beneficiaries in their effort to secure health services and of course to address some problems currently observed in the system," he added.
Email immediately after visiting a doctor
As far as all GHS beneficiaries are concerned, as explained to "F" by the director of the HIO, Efi Kamitsi, "a regulation will be included in the system to inform patients about the visits they make to their personal doctors".
"Based on what is currently in force, each beneficiary, depending on the age group to which he belongs, is entitled to a certain number of visits to his personal doctor each year. If this number is exceeded, the personal doctor has the right (not mandatory) to charge the beneficiary €15 per additional visit. At the moment, beneficiaries do not have anything in their hands that officially informs them how many visits their personal doctor has registered in the system and the new regulation comes to fill this gap", said the director of the HIO. Each beneficiary, immediately after registering a visit to the GHS software, will be able both through his electronic page in the system and via e-mail to be informed about the number of visits he has made. This will help both beneficiaries and doctors.
It is recalled that recently citizens complained because their personal doctors counted their telephone service as a normal visit and then when the service was done with physical presence, they demanded to be paid an amount of €15 since as they claimed the specified number of visits of the year had been reached. Complaints were also recorded on the part of doctors, who in many cases are called upon to manage beneficiaries who for their own reasons communicate constantly and without substantial reason with them asking them to serve them by phone.
In the meantime, and regardless of everything else, the HIO informed yesterday personal and specialist doctors as well as pharmacists of the GHS that on May 2, the system for filling in a questionnaire when prescribing antibiotics will be implemented.
The questionnaire is being implemented in collaboration with the National Coordinating Committee "One Health" of the Ministry of Health and aims to address the increased use of antibiotics resulting in the development of antimicrobial resistance. The questionnaire will be completed through the software system by all attending physicians.
INTERVENTION
If the Ministry of Foreign Affairs also gets started. Health...
The moves taken by the HIO are in the right direction. However, in order to balance the GHS and correct all the distortions that are currently observed, much more needs to be done. However, it would also be good for the Ministry of Health to get started, which apparently has not set in its priorities at all the issues related to the GHS and the problems faced by citizens in their effort to secure services through the system. We stuck to the TACs, which are not the GHS. Their problems are timeless. The real problems lie elsewhere and, unfortunately, at the moment there seems to be no will for the HIO to receive the political support it needs to make corrective moves.
