The Greek government is introducing measures to reduce the long waitlists of patients seeking out surgeries at the country’s public hospitals through what it calls the “Single List of Surgeries.”
According to Prime Minister Mitsotakis, the Single List of Surgeries will include all citizens that are deemed to require surgeries and will have interoperability with other relevant platforms, like the National Patient Register and the Individual Electronic Health Record (IDIKA).
In preparation for launching the list, the government had to integrate lists that were held individually by different hospitals and announced that waiting time has already been reduced by 40- 45%.
Hospitals made over 60,000 calls to patients on waitlists and in many cases discovered that thousands had already been serviced by other facilities. In other cases, they discovered that patients had been recorded twice.
One example of a hospital that has benefited from the process is Evangelismos hospital, located in downtown Athens. The hospital initially had 5,186 persons on the waitlist and through the “housekeeping” process has reduced the list to 2,822 patients.
The procedures around the launch of the Single List are detailed in the relevant ministerial decision, which has been signed by Greek Minister of Health Adonis Georgiadis, Deputy Minister Marios Themistocleous, Minister of Digital Governance Dimitrios Papastergiou and Deputy Minister of Finance Athanasios Petralias.
Patients will now be added to the list by their attending surgeon and patients will receive all data about their surgery electronically either via email or through the government’s MyHealthApp.
