Ensuring Public Awareness About Health Care Financing (AM0018)

To create healthcare system financial portal where people, professionals and the public may obtain information on the state-guaranteed funding, on the basic package of services, when the payment for services is due for the patient, and when not, how they can get recipes subject to state-guaranteed payment, on financial and non-financial reports and other information.

3. Public Awareness of Healthcare Financing

Commitment Text:

There is a huge gap amongst the existing developments in the health care financing system; the citizens do not know their rights and are not able to manage their rights in a variety of health care system sectors, inter alia receiving hospital care and primary health care services. Within some standards of organizing and financing the treatment those processes are described, but there are dynamic and transparent systems revealing the developments of those relations.

To create healthcare system financial portal where people, professionals and the public may obtain information on the state-guaranteed funding, on the basic package of services, when the payment for services is due for the patient, and when not, how they can get recipes subject to state-guaranteed payment, on financial and non-financial reports and other information.

Responsible Institution: Ministry of Health of the Republic of Armenia

Supporting Institution(s): None

Start Date: September 2014                                                                 End Date: September 2015

Commitment Aim

This commitment entails creation of a healthcare system financing portal that would allow users to access information on government provided free health services and healthcare financing.

Status

Midterm: Limited

The health financing portal    http://sha.am was created on 1 January 2014, prior to the start of the action plan. However, the web page on state-guaranteed services was still under construction at the time of progress report. By July 2016, the portal contained more than 29 different reports in PDF format    According to the Government, there were about 10000 visits to the portal since its creation. The healthcare database is available at the Ministry of Health’s ‘Outpatient Clinics Analytical Reporting Portal’  ^{“Outpatient Clinics Analytical Reporting Portal”, Ministry of Health, accessed June 13, 2017, https://pbf.am/public-reports.aspx.} .

End of Term: Complete

The portal is functioning and on 10 June 2016 the Ministry of Health made a presentation for nine CSOs working in the health sector. According to representatives of FOICA and TIAC, also in attendance at the presentation, the website is not sufficiently user-friendly. In addition, the Ministry of Health would need to be more proactive in promoting its usage. Moreover, it is difficult to state whether complete information related to health care financing is available on the specified websites.

Did it Open Government?

Access to Information: Did Not Change

The commitment aimed to make information on state-guaranteed health services available to public and medical professionals. According to TIAC, public awareness on existence of this tool is low. At the time of writing this report, implementation of the commitment had not brought any improvement in public access to information. Although limited information is available on the two aforementioned portals, FOICA indicates that CSOs working in health sector are not active users. The Ministry of Health does not publish statistics on  primary users of the website, nor on the type of information searched.

Carried Forward?

The commitment was not carried over to the third action plan. To make the website more usable and beneficial, information would have to be available not only in PDF, but also in machine readable format. Besides, the website could also be of further utility by providing information on the number of accesses and downloads, and additional user statistics.