Hospitals and specialist-consultative healthcare institutions in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia are to establish electronic waiting lists which will be in operation from 1 January 2012. The lists are intended to facilitate the transparent and controlled operation of healthcare facilities.

Health Minister Nikola Todorov made this announcement at a press conference. He said that every hospital will be responsible for publishing electronic charts for scheduling appointments and every health institution will have a list of medical interventions to be performed, and these will indicate when the appointments and interventions will occur. Patients' personal data will also be contained in the waiting lists as encrypted data, which the patient receives at the time of registering to use the health service.

Special focus, Todorov added, will be placed on the transparency of the new system, preventing corruption and providing regulation of the additional work of doctoral staff. He said that currently waiting lists are in practice virtually non-existent. They are on paper, in a notebook maintained by some staff in the health institution, and they are not transparent nor subject to control. This opens up the possibility of making illicit changes in the list, and the possibility of corruption, and means that additional activities of doctors lack transparency.

Todorov said: "With the new system governing the operation of the institution and protecting the rights of patients, the patient will know from the time of their arrival at the facility whether they will get the required health service and precisely how soon they can realistically be seen, which prevents the practice of changing the order, and prevents abuses of patients through additional interventions."

He pointed out that the waiting lists do not apply to emergency cases, which as before will be treated immediately. However, through the website or bulletin board of the institution (which will be updated on a daily basis), a patient can verify whether there will be changes to the original scheduling.

Every health institution is obliged to publicise the waiting list in a prominent location on their official website, making use of a web application that will be set up by the Ministry of Health (Министерство за Здравство, in Macedonian),with an obligation to update it daily. The health institution is also obliged to nominate a person and their deputy to manage the waiting list. It should be maintained in chronological order, and by matching the patient to a certain type of health service, by the type of health service that will be used, by the urgency of the health situation, and by assessing the further course of treatment chosen by the referring doctor. For health facilities that fail to maintain the waiting list, or fail to maintain it according to the criteria established by law, sanctions are foreseen.

Management of the waiting list and the use of health services to patients according to the waiting list is the responsibility of the Health Insurance Fund (Фондот за здравствено осигурување, in Macedonian) and the State Sanitary and Health Inspectorate (Државниот санитарен и здравствен инспекторат, in Macedonian).

Todorov said: "The introduction of electronic waiting lists is correlated with several larger projects of the Ministry to increase efficiency and productivity in hospitals, including the installation of modern medical equipment, the launch of a new system for the referral of patients, and greater regulation and control of additional activities of public health services."