From October 1, Ukraine Fully Switches to Electronic Sick Leave: How the New System Works

The new system will help reduce corruption risks.

From October 1, Ukraine has fully switched to electronic sick leave, which will be issued at all medical facilities across the country.

We explain the key points about how the new system works and what the heads of the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Digital Transformation said at the briefing.

Electronic sick leave works in such a way that the Pension Fund and employers automatically receive all the necessary data about it.

The transitional stage of launching electronic sick leave across Ukraine began back in June. Over this time, almost all Ukrainian hospitals, around 3,000 medical facilities, have been connected to the unified medical information system.

During the system testing period, almost one million electronic sick leave certificates were issued in total.

The Ministry of Digital Transformation, the Ministry of Health, the National Health Service of Ukraine (NHSU) and representatives of the Medical Information System (MIS) held several trainings and webinars for doctors on how to correctly generate medical certificates and sick leave forms in electronic format and work with them.

Health Minister Viktor Lyashko noted that more than 1.1 million electronic medical certificates of temporary incapacity for work have already been created in 2,991 facilities by 47 thousand doctors.

Viktor Lyashko
Minister of Health of Ukraine

It is only a dialogue between the doctor and the patient. The doctor determines that incapacity for work may last for a certain period under one of nine established categories. The patient must make sure the doctor entered the data correctly and received an SMS. Then the employer is notified in a convenient way that you have been issued sick leave. When you recover, get proper treatment, return to work, the electronic sick leave is also closed electronically. The employer sees all of this in their account.

First, the doctor generates a medical certificate, a document issued after the doctor's examination that contains the general diagnosis. The doctor creates it in the Register and certifies it with an electronic signature. The patient will receive an SMS message about this.

From there, within seconds, the sick leave enters the Pension Fund Register, where an electronic sick leave form is generated, the document on the basis of which payments are calculated. The patient also receives a message on their phone about this from the Pension Fund of Ukraine.

The employer will be able to see the employee's sick leave on the Pension Fund of Ukraine portal.

Yevgeny Kapinus
Chairman of the Board of the Pension Fund of Ukraine

Electronic sick leave forms are generated automatically. There is no longer any need to collect certificates or stand in queues. This will speed up the process of receiving payments. In addition, everyone will be able to check their information in the personal account on the Pension Fund of Ukraine web portal. As a result, the process will become more transparent, and corruption risks will decrease.

The information contained in the medical certificate is personally signed by the doctor with an electronic signature. This means that the medical worker bears full responsibility for the data he or she enters.

An attempt to falsify data, for example issuing sick leave to a person who was not ill, may result in the doctor and even the facility losing their medical license. Employees of the Social Insurance Fund will monitor this.

As Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov reported, digitalization will make it possible to analyze "how many sick leaves each hospital and doctor issues and the reasons for abnormal situations".

"By our estimates, several billion hryvnias can be saved on the electronic sick leave service," Fedorov said.

Maryna Lazebna
Minister of Social Policy

From now on, doctors treat, people recover, employers see that employees are on sick leave from the first day, documents are processed automatically, and people receive payments without unnecessary delays.