For foreign delegations
Before moving on with what we at TEHIK do, it is important to understand the ecosystem we are a part of.
Estonia, a country of 1.3 million people, saw an opportunity after regaining its independence in 1991 to digitalise its governing bodies. The sizeable cost of offering traditional governmental services with the state’s budget being 130 million euros, along with the sparsity of the Estonian population were the primary motivators for change.
The goal became apparent: every single service must be made available online. These are the components that made it possible:
- Saves 3 million working hours annually
- Has over 3000 different services connected to it, including 99% of all government-offered services
- Over 2.5 billion transactions made per year
- Is used in 12 countries
- Most of the governmental procedures connected to your person can be accessed with it – is legally binding.
- 64% of the Estonian population uses their ID-card regularly.
- Helped introduce new identification opportunities in mobile-ID, smart-ID.
- 100,000+ e-Residents, who can interact with government services and for example establish a business.
TEHIK develops and manages e-services in three important areas: work, health and social protection. Every person in Estonia comes into contact with these services to a greater or lesser extent during their lifetime. The birth of a child brings several services from the field of health, but the state will immediately start paying various subsidies, which are provided through services in the field of social protection. At one point, a person comes into contact with the field of work and the services involved. During working life and also in pension age, contact is also made with various social protection support services in the social field.These areas are also very strongly intertwined. Employment injuries are related to the health field and the connections between the work fields. More serious diseases are related to a special type of field, formed by both the social protection and health fields. The examples are endless.
So-called invisible and event-based services of top institutions are being developed for citizens in order to make public services simple and efficient for the user. In the case of the citizen, life events are, for example, marriage, divorce, having a child, having the right to drive, retirement etc. The goal is to offer services to the user as a one smooth service, proactively and at the push of a button. A video explaining this in detail can be found below.
Junction of Information
Being interested in our work means that the focus of your visit should be the ICT side of governmental operations. Our expertise lies in the creation of e-services and how they function. To manage expectations of both us and your delegation, we provided a list of links for subjects in the Ministry of Social Affairs' sphere of influence. The institutions found here can go into greater detail than we ever could when it comes to their work!
Introduction to the Ministry of Social Affairs
WHY?
Ministry of Social Affairs has one of the highest yearly budgets in the public sector, being 7.91 billion euros in 2023. It hosts three fields of governance: Healthcare, Labour, and Social security. All types of welfare, pensions, also funding of health institutions are all covered by the ministry’s budget.
Now, since everything is required to be digitalized in Estonia, all of these institutions under ministries need their own functioning services. These are offered by ICT institutions within the ministries with the help of private sector. Since there are a lot of services, around 6% of Estonia’s workforce consists of ICT sector employees.
One of those ICT institutions is TEHIK, that offers its clients under the Ministry of Social Affairs e-services. We provide those services with accessibility in mind, focusing in-depth on time-saving, so that either a citizen or a government worker can focus on what is important, rather than dealing with the complexities of bureaucracy.
If you find yourself spending way too much time on something, then TEHIK has not worked on it yet.
WHAT?
The scope of our work is extremely impactful and affects a significant portion of Estonia’s e-governance system. We believe that no one should spend unnecessary time using the Estonian e-services for health, social security and labour. To fulfil this goal, 200 experts work in Health and Welfare Information Systems Centre (TEHIK), who are creating the future success story of e-Estonia.
Our most important service, the Health Portal, allows the citizen to access their medical data, including ePrescription. In fact, 98% of prescriptions are online. Here are some more facts about our work:
- For a population of 1.3 million, the Health Information System hosts 148.3 million documents of patients, spanning from 2008 until today;
- The Working Life Portal is accessed by half a million people every year;
- Our experience is highly valued internationally, with 29 delegations from 20 different countries visiting our offices.
More about our work can be found here.
HOW?
Our work involves updating and creating new services for our clients. Consultations help us to reach conclusions on what we need to produce: should it be a regular watch or should it have smart features as well? We create procurements, through which we acquire necessary equipment and involve development partners to assist us in developing the solution. So far, over our 6 years of existence, more than 40 companies have helped us realise nearly 50 projects, which all contribute to the function of e-Estonia.
We are also updating our older services to fit the proactive-solutions doctrine. Whereas the older version of Patient Portal looks out of date and lacks coherent and understandable UI, the new iteration focuses on how information could be displayed in a manner that is more interactive and easier to comprehend. In November 2023, the Health Portal was released to the public, garnering positive attention and feedback. ICT solutions are not a one-time investment, but rather a long-term commitment to creating a system that becomes more effective overtime.
WHEN?
We work on bettering and creating services all the time. Clients come to us with a wish for a new solution and it is up to us to map the requirements for completing the project. All of the services have customer support during daytime, and most have quality-of-life contracts running after the active phase of development ends.
However, when a larger social event takes place, it is up to us to create a digital solution to assist officials and citizens overcome it. For example, the COVID-19 outbreak required overhauls to the Patient Portal, with test results and vaccination booking being new features on the website. Also, an app for tracking a person’s contact with someone infected, HOIA, was created by TEHIK in cooperation with private sector companies.
Being two steps ahead of the curve has helped us reach deadlines so that our clients could reach theirs as well!
CONSULTATIONS & VISITS
Several international delegations visit us to learn more about our work. Sometimes also to learn from our experience and avoid the same mistakes that we have already gone through and corrected. Here are the countries that have visited us:
We are happy to share our experience, but we try to do it in such a way that our core work and development work does not suffer. Therefore, we cannot always guarantee that we will be able to find time for our experts for this purpose. Nevertheless, if you are interested in what we do and are ready to share your experiences, please contact us at hello[at]tehik.ee for further enquiries.
Here are some links for you, where you can find more necessary and interesting information about the functioning of the Estonian e-state:
e-Estonia – We have built a digital society and we can show you how
Healthcare system – compulsory solidarity-based health insurance
Proactive solutions – a new way of approach for integrating e-services into a citizen’s life