The COVID-19 epidemic has reshaped society and, among other things, has caused changes in healthcare systems. During this time, their weak points were exposed. Technology has often emerged as the savior of the challenges they faced. The digitization of health systems was already taking place before the outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic, but not with such attention and speed. Through the creation of the thesis, we tried to find out what stage the digitalization of Slovenian healthcare is at, what changes occurred during the epidemic, and how the system could still be upgraded. A descriptive method was used to describe the issue when writing the thesis. When presenting the insights of various authors, we researched with the help of the compilation method.
We assumed that the research of successful practices of healthcare digitization abroad can serve as a contribution to the public administration in upgrading the existing healthcare system in Slovenia. The results of the research also affect all citizens, who are the target audience of healthcare digitization. Namely, we have collected up-to-date data on already digitized health services, which for individuals can mean raising awareness of content that is relevant to them in this area. We found that the healthcare system in Slovenia has already been partially digitized. Informatization started even before COVID-19 with the eHealth project, which envisaged some digital solutions. With the outbreak of the epidemic, the Slovenian health system began to upgrade the already existing services, which recorded an increase in users, while some new ones were also developed. We also found out that there are stories about the success of digitization coming from abroad, from which we identified solutions that could be implemented by Slovenian healthcare.
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