The Ministry of Health of Ukraine Opens the License Register for the First Time

The Ministry of Health of Ukraine has officially opened the medical license register. Information is currently available as open data on the ministry portal.

What is the purpose of the medical license register?

Opening the data on licenses allows patients to check whether a medical facility has the right to provide its services and choose legal clinics.

Medical workers can use the register to monitor their licenses, check their partners, and analyze colleagues from the region and all over the country. Besides, more patients will go to legal clinics.

What are possible improvements for the register?

The authorities can take certain steps to improve the medical license register and make it even more useful for Ukrainians:

1. Adding the codes of companies and PEs. Interoperability. The absence of such data makes the register impossible to combine with other data sets, i.e., public records. The ability to combine different registers is a principle of open data interoperability regulated by Decree No. 835 of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine.

2. It is necessary to add clinic addresses and specify for which services the licenses were issued. All data from the register must be published, except for personal information. It violates the default principle of openness defined by Decree No. 835 of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine.

3. The data must be published on the open data portal. The medical license data is available on the website of the Ministry of Health of Ukraine instead of Open Data Portal — like it should be according to Decree No. 835 on open data.

A year ago, Opendatabot started a campaign dedicated to making medical facility licenses public. Then we were supported by medical workers across the country. Now the Ministry of Health of Ukraine should bring the data into line with regulations and international standards.