The Prime Minister's Control Body will carry out a control at the National Health Insurance House - CNAS to check the functioning of the national health card IT system.

Prime Minister Dacian Ciolos ordered the control, which will be carried out by a mixed team made of the PM's Control Body and the Health Ministry’s Control Body. They will verify how the system has functioned from January 1 this year until now.

The control was ordered due to the numerous errors recorded by the national health card IT system.

All Romanians who pay health contributions to the state have a card which they use whenever they access healthcare services paid from public funds. The national health card system was implemented so that the state has a clear view of the money spent in the healthcare system and to prevent fraud, such as the issuing of fake prescriptions for expensive drugs compensated by the state. Normally, all medical exams and drug prescriptions must be registered in this system.

The IT system for the functioning of the health card was made by HP, Novensys Corporation, and Siveco. The contract’s value was EUR 19.5 million, in 2012.

At the beginning of this year, the National Health Insurance House launched an auction to get maintenance and technical support services for the IT system. In June, local IT group Teamnet, founded by controversial investor and MP Sebastian Ghita, won the contracts worth EUR 5 million for a period of three years. However, CNAS and Teamnet haven’t yet signed the contract.

Meanwhile, the system has been down every few days and CNAS decided to allow the offline registration of the services provided to patients when the system is down. Otherwise, family doctors wouldn’t have been able to do any examinations or issue any prescriptions.

editor@romania-insider.com