I love my family doctor

I love my family doctor. She is the best there is. What I hate is when I need to go to the hospital to do specialized exam or a checkup I need to carry with me a big wad of papers and for each new (or re -new, since docs forget you the minute you leave) I have to tell my sick story in about two minutes.

If I would be so lucky for my story to get there. If I need to do some further checkups I then need to receive signed sleeps from the currently visited doctor, or go back to my original doctor with a written diagnosis/opinion for sleeps for new doctors, thus adding to the pile of papers I need to carry around with me and then I need to send an e-mail (from my home) with scanned medical sleeps and then wait for a couple of weeks or months (the waiting is an endemic problem, and necessarily part of my rant) to get to a doctor who will not know anything about my condition, will not read or will read briefly my papers and will listen to me only for two minutes.

What I would like to have is a centralized national patient system where all patient data are stored centrally available to all medical professionals trough secured web services.

No carrying of paper work.
Automatic registration and list entry for medical services.
Every doctor will have a tip of his fingertips all my medical history.
I will finally have a fully recorded medical file (do you really think I go back to my doc with all the pieces of paper I get and she then retypes every sentence of every paper).

Some progress was made when the health ministry introduces on-line drug recepies. Which is a really neat thing. I go to my doctor. She types into her medical application, I get up go to any pharmacy flash my health insurance card and get my meds. No paper work, no talking, everything done transparently and paperless. What a saving in paper only that is.

I would really like for every service provided by government functions or activities requested from citizens to be either exposed as web services for people to build applications for (like Facebook applications or tweet decks for example) or to provide on-line web applications for me to use.

If for example I need to pay for a document to be printed, why can't I flash my bank card login to web page type my request, card info and e-mail address and then wait for an e-mail notification which will tell me where and when to just pick my paper or god forbid pay extra for mail delivery if I'm not in a such a hurry.

The Croatian ministry of finance did a really great things this year. They will force every cash business (e.g. a business which receives cash for products or services rendered) to register each transaction via a web service with the tax department which will in turn send back a unique transaction code which will be printed on the receipt given to the consumer or client of the selling company.

Now a lot of software and a lot of companies will need to crunch new software to comply with this specification. A great win for the software industry in Croatia, thank you government!

Another good thing it will force companies , imho, to standardize on common domain elements in their systems (does it really make sense to have on company object created in every application when you are required to send a company object to the fiscal service, or a bill?).

What if all government elements would work like this. We could also have open source components for common integration providing all the domain objects requested by those services. So no longer multiple bill and company or point of sale object, or patient, or doctor or whatever; the government non-intentionally may have stumbled on the read to standardize the Croatian software industry.

For example I really can see someone creating an open - source project for financial ministry web services. It would be easy to write , the services are not that complex, and could really boost the market and production. Need fiscalization, get the library , customize it to your needs and carry on with the business.

Heck, why do all the fiscalization affected companies even rewrite the code to access the services. Why not write once and provide for free or for a nominal fee.

Why doesn't the government provide such libraries. It would really easy for the company that wrote the fiscalization services to crank a library in all the popular languages (C#, Java, PHP, Python and Ruby) which will provide common client features with it (domain objects, functionality for all scenarios, catalogues for integrating with the service).

Here are some links to files related to the fiscaliazation process:

• http://www.porezna-uprava.hr/fiskalizacija/fiskalizacija.asp
• http://www.porezna-uprava.hr/fiskalizacija/dokumenti/Fiskalizacija%20-%20Tehnicka%20specifikacija%20za%20korisnike_v1.2.pdf
• http://www.porezna-uprava.hr/fiskalizacija/dokumenti/Fiskalizacija-WSDL_v1.2.zip
• http://www.porezna-uprava.hr/fiskalizacija/2012_09_12%20Fiskalizacija%20(centralizirani).pdf
• http://www.porezna-uprava.hr/fiskalizacija/2012_09_12%20Fiskalizacija%20(pojedinacne%20blagajne).pdf