Welsh Affairs Committee
22 April 2026
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Welsh Affairs Committee House of Commons
00:03 - 00:30
Speaker 1
Opening the public session, Petra. Thank you very much for that private session. That was really helpful. It's really helpful to have you in front of us today, and thank you for giving us your time. I suppose my name is Ruth Jones, I'm the chair of the committee, Welsh Affair Select Committee, and we have committee members here today who are really interested in the digitisation of health care records.
I suppose the first question is what were the main reasons and when did Estonia move to digital health records?
00:32 - 01:59
Speaker 2
Estonia started digitalizing pretty much as soon as we regained independence. So in the nineteen nineties, I'm not gonna go into the history of that, But the, before you digitalize, you have to digitize. But we can talk about the digitalization of the health records. The beginning would be 2007, 2008. So that is when we already launched the first interfaces with, Citizens Data being, at that point, not quite usable, not quite user friendly.
It took us a while to learn how to design user friendly interfaces. But by 2008, all of the supporting infrastructure that is required for you to build digital platforms for transportation, public housing, whatever you can imagine, health care included, that was already in place. So the eHealth system can't exist because we have the underlying backbone supporting all of the processes in Estonia. We have a unique digital identifier that is actually just an ID card with a personal code, a chip at the back, different ways of authenticating ourselves, so proving our identity when we log in into any service, digital or not, to be honest. You can also just identify yourself when you go to a hospital in person.
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