Slovenia’s coalition parties have removed a key health reform bill from the agenda of an upcoming parliament session following heavy criticism from the data protection commissioner and the parliament’s own legal service for playing fast and loose with sensitive personal data.
The 50-page opinion of the parliament’s legal services lists a number of shortcomings of the health digitalisation bill, mostly regarding clarity and objectives of multiple provisions on data processing.
Yet parties in the ruling coalition said that there was not enough time “to examine the opinion of the legal services and draft relevant amendments”.
Set to take effect on 1 January 2024, the bill would require all public healthcare providers to feed all medical data into a single IT system, managed, maintained and developed by a state-owned limited liability company.
The bill not only creates individual databases of sensitive private data, it also integrates them into a single central healthcare IT system. The private data in the IT system is also linked to medical charts kept by individual healthcare providers.
Such a massive database increases the risk of data privacy breaches, such as unauthorised access and system breaches, the legal services has warned.
The data protection commissioner warned that the bill runs afoul of the Constitution and key provisions of data privacy legislation.
The coalition will now take some time to review all the remarks.
“We take them seriously and responsibly, and what we are focused on now is to find solutions, even though we will not debate the bill at the next plenary,” said Borut Sajovic, deputy group leader of the senior coalition party, the Freedom Movement.
The healthcare digitalisation bill is part of the broader reform of public healthcare, which is the number one priority of Prime Minister Robert Golob’s government.
The withdrawal comes just days after Health Minister Danijel Bešič Loredan was asked by Golob to step down due to conceptual differences regarding the development of public healthcare.
The resignation has been described as the worst blow to the government since it took office a year ago.
Once corrected, the bill is likely to be on the parliament’s agenda in autumn.
(Sebastijan R. Maček | sta.si)
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