Research Plan

Comparison of Hungary’s and Japan's Basic Health Care Systems' Documentation and Software Practices


One of the main problems of Hungary's health system is that the computational procession of paper based documentations is yet to be accomplished. This is the case in Hungary's basic health care system as well, which includes the following health services:
• General practitioners (GPs), family doctors, pediatricians
• Basic tooth care
• School health care
• Maternity care, infant and child care (welfare nurses)
• Physicians in attendance
• Occupational health services

The softwares used for record keeping of patients' data are not unified, several record keeping programs are used over the country.

Lacking an official and unified version there are numerous GP applied softwares the quality of which is diverse, nor they are compatible with one another. Nowadays there are 20-30 GP softwares available in Hungary. This makes financing difficult, because monthly reporting submitted to the County Health Funds is different, various types of document files are used and written reports are copied on 3,5” floppy discs. This is the practice despite the fact that floppies are long ago obsolete (floppy discs are no longer produced by SONY in Japan as of April 2010). Unfortunately there is a total lack of Internet-based connections among the various health services (as listed above), and online reporting is missing completely. These problems effect not only in the GP system, but in fact the whole health care system in Hungary.

The main areas of my research plan are:
• Studying and analyzing the paper-based and computational documentation methods used in Japan, and the implementation of Japanese practices in Hungary.
• Looking for problem solutions, with the perspective that electronic record keeping should not only partially complement data reporting but in fact should be the only practice, which would substantially reduce the growing administrative burdens.
• Specifying the advantages of electronic record keeping. For example: routine health screening or vaccination of patients and in case these are not completed, automatic warning of the doctors and their patients.
• Developing a credible electronic record keeping, unifying the softwares or developing and demanding a compatible format.
• Applying anonymous and decoded data during data procession, ethical data management.
• Making health care financing in Hungary simpler through modernization of data recording, reporting and data procession.
• Documented problem solving of each level of the basic health care system, developing solutions based on Japanese practices.
• Exploring the advantages and possible disadvantages of online connections among the various health care services.