At a time when trust in institutions — including in health care — is being eroded by mis- and disinformation, Estonia has won the population’s support to safely store and share all personal and health data. Support is so high that only 2,500 people — less than 0.2 percent of the population — have opted out of sharing their data between health services on the platform.
Estonia has a “high level of societal trust for new technologies … [because] we experience the benefit,” said Siim Saare, founder and CEO of Lifeyear, which operates a remote cardiac care platform. “We see the added value and how it makes our lives easier every day. And it outweighs any theoretical risks.”
Those benefits include seamless transfers of care between a general practitioner, hospitals, clinics, nurses, paramedics and other health services; the use of AI to identify patients at higher risk of disease, to offer targeted screening to diagnose and treat patients earlier for illnesses such as cancer; and saving time from never repeating or uploading the same information twice.
“The estimation is that every Estonian saves two full weeks of time in a year because you don’t have to queue up, you don’t have to find your old birth certificate every five years or whenever you need it, you don’t have to say again and again where you live, because you’re in the system already,” Sven Sakkov, the Estonian ambassador to the U.K., told POLITICO at a press lunch in London.
Beefing up security
Estonia is a world leader on digital services and has long claimed the moniker of “e-stonia” to underline its digital savvy. It bet big on technology and startups to counter a flatlining 1990s economy, and transformed much of its government services early on to run online.
In some countries, like former East Germany, historic Soviet occupation left a paranoia over the handing of digital data. In Estonia, though, the pivot to digital services instilled a high level of trust in the government’s handling of privacy and digital health systems.