eBolovanje System to Be Introduced – Employees Will No Longer Have to Bring Doctors’ Certificates to Employers, and Here Are All the New Features

In addition to announcing extraordinary inspection in certain health centers due to the suspicion that medical doctors had approved fake sick leaves, during her visit to Nis, the prime minister of Serbia, Ana Brnabic, noted that, in the next period, she expected the eBolovanje (eMedical Leave) system to be launched, which, according to her, should suppress such practices.

However, the citizens are not too sure how eBolovanje will be able to control whether a sick leave is justified or not or whether the linking of the health center, the National Health insurance Fund, the employer and the employee means that the company will have an insight into the employee’s medical record.

As Isidora Smigic, the coordinator for regulation reforms at the NALED, clarifies for the Danas daily, the aim of eBolovanje is for the administrative procedures for taking medical leaves to be facilitated for patients, among which are pregnant women, but also to simultaneously have this information submitted to employers more efficiently.

Also, the aim is to facilitate, for the National Health Insurance Fund, access to the data important for the commissions to decide on whether to approve medical leave extensions for more than 30 days and the process of the calculation and payment of the wage compensation during the medical leave.

– The eBolovanje system should digitize and automate the exchange of the documentation in the process of issuing the confirmation on a temporary inability to work, by connecting health institutions and doctors, the National Health Insurance Fund, as well as employers. This will accelerate the process itself, the patients will no longer have to bring doctors’ certificates to employers or the medical documentation to their NHIF branch office, and it will also enable the NHIF to more quickly pay the wage reimbursement to the employers for the employees who are on medical leaves, in the cases when they are absent for more than a month – Smigic says.

She emphasizes that the employer will not have an insight into the health documentation of the employee, but that, instead, they will get the information, through the system, whether the employee is on a medical leave (not for which reason) and in what period.

– The eBolovanje system can considerably contribute to the reduction of misuses and the improvement of the efficiency of the system. The digitization will enable the checking of the data in real time, the data on the employees, their years of service and their medical data. It will also enable monitoring, analytics and reporting which will help more easily identify irregularities and attempts at misuse. On one hand, the aim is for patients to not have to bring over the documentation while sick and to enable a more efficient payment of the salary during the medical leave, but on the other hand, the misuse done by those who are unconscionable leads to serious problems for the economy due to the taking of fake medical leaves and it often happens that they have over 10% of the employees on medical leaves at the same time over the whole year – Smigic says.

She adds that this practice leads to the blocking of production activities and the inability to carry out the work in certain companies, and as she points out, in the long term, it can also lead to the closing of those companies.

– We are sure that the eBolovanje system will help establish this type of control and reduce the number of misuses, which is in the interest of the whole society – Smigic concludes.

NALED Beograd

Republički fond za zdravstveno osiguranje Beograd

NALED

National Health Insurance Fund

Isidora Šmigić

Ana Brnabić

eBolovanje

taking a medical leave