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Country’s healthcare system in a nutshell
Turkey provides universal public health insurance through the Social Security Institution (SSI), allowing all registered residents access to free healthcare. However, equitable access remains a challenge, partly due to a nationwide shortage of doctors. As a result, many people opt for additional private insurance to cover treatments in private hospitals.
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Funding for social insurance premiums comes from both employer and employee contributions, with exemptions for those on low incomes. The MoH contracts with family physicians for preventative and primary care, who are paid according to the number of patients under their care. Patients are required to make co-payments at varying levels for primary, secondary, and tertiary care services (World Health Organization, n.d.).
Public vs private
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The national PHR
History
e-Nabız, the Turkish Personal Health Record, was put into service in Turkey in 2015 and was awarded "The Best Health Application" in WSA (World Summit Award) in 2016. The platform, which is an application of the Turkish Ministry of Health, was developed by Tiga Healthcare, the same that has contracts with the Turkish Ministry of Health for the Pharmaceutical Track & Trace System and E-prescription (as per image below).
E-Nabız was developed for citizens to enable them to access their health data collected from multiple different health institutions, in one place. Thanks to the application, patients Patients can authorize their healthcare professionals to access their records.
(Tiga Healthcare Technologies, 2023)
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Features
The Turkish PHR system allows users to use 38 different services for treatment, prevention, health promotion, and health-related and interrelated areas.
In the appointment section, patients can see their future scheduled hospital appointments and information on past ones, and they also can book new ones. Patients can see details of past visits, including:
prescriptions,
diagnosis,
written reports,
tests performed,
radiological images.
In the notifications section, patients can see their recent activities, such as the latest login and hospital visits.
Patients have multiple options when it comes to sharing: "No physician can see my information" “Family physicians can see my information", "The physician who performed the examination can see my information", " Every physician in the health facility where I had my examination can see my health information", " All physicians can see my information".
Patients can also share a piece of selected health information with persons of their choice, for a period of their choice (they can also share permanently), after entering their email address and phone number.Patients can see their disease history, and personal information such as blood type, age, and smoking status.
Patients can see their measurements, such as weight, height and body mass index.
Patients can evaluate a health facility visit in terms of service quality and comment on the visit.
They can also track and manage their blood and bone marrow donation choices.
They can make organ donation choices.
They can see allergies.
They can see intensive care hospitalisation information
They can let their insurance companies access the data
Patients can add ‘emergency notes’ to a section so that healthcare professionals can read them in case of emergency.
Patients can upload files
They can see their vaccine calendar
They can see an access log
Patients can add measurements. E-Nabiz will also retrieve data from OS or Google Fit.
Covid-19 features: view the vaccine information and appointments, get the vaccine certification.
Challenges and areas for improvement
Published outcomes - statistics
In 2018, 11 million citizens used e-Nabız. In 2022, the platform counted 68 million active users. This accounts for 80.0% of the population.
Data is flowing from the 28,608 system-integrated health facilities and other 39 e-Nabız-integrated public institutions (ministries, etc).
registering radiological images in the system prevented patients from needing to request them again. This led to a significant cost savings of 27.5%, equivalent to 750 million Turkish Lira, in the domain of radiological images.
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Age interval | e-Nabiz users | Total population | Ratio of e-Nabiz users in total population |
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0-4 | 4,940,318 | 5,913,609 | 84% (kids' parents) |
5-9 | 5,656,183 | 6,624,202 | 85% (kids' parents) |
10-14 | 5,395,513 | 6,438,152 | 84% (kids' parents) |
15-19 | 5,372,255 | 6,229,709 | 86% |
20-24 | 5,712,808 | 6,741,580 | 85% |
25-29 | 5,605,692 | 6,476,899 | 87% |
30-34 | 5,233,845 | 6,341,787 | 83% |
35-39 | 5,075,415 | 6,386,208 | 79% |
40-44 | 5,188,475 | 6,547,162 | 79% |
45-49 | 4,407,263 | 5,662,261 | 78% |
50-54 | 3,686,493 | 4,754,484 | 78% |
55-59 | 3,201,477 | 4,707,180 | 68% |
60-64 | 2,471,722 | 3,611,916 | 68% |
65-69 | 1,933,364 | 3,156,448 | 61% |
70-74 | 1,274,086 | 2,175,024 | 59% |
75-79 | 729,507 | 1,392,718 | 52% |
80-84 | 393,509 | 861,409 | 46% |
85-89 | 171,028 | 456,548 | 37% |
90+ | 67,521 | 202,977 | 33% |
Screenshots
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In the "Smart Assistant", which you can access from the menu, you can view all your disease history, and personal information such as blood type, weight, height, age, body mass index and smoking status. The diseases you have had are marked on a human body diagram and the diagnoses are shown in the fields indicated with dots.
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In the percentile section, you can see percentile charts for head circumference, height and weight.
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Bibliography
Birinci, Ş., 2023. A digital opportunity for patients to manage their health: Turkey national personal health record system (The e-Nabız). Balkan Medical Journal, 40(3), p.215. Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10175887/ (Accessed 13 December 2023).
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