New connectivity system between hospitals and emergency services will be operational next week, announced Health Minister Dr. Asen Medzhidiev at a briefing in the Ministry of Health. He emphasized that with the launch of the system, the time from receiving an emergency patient's call to hospitalization, if necessary, will be significantly reduced.

"Thanks to the joint work with the Ministry of Electronic Governance and Information Services, we managed to build the system extremely quickly. Emergency teams will have real-time information about available hospital beds. This way, when an ambulance takes an emergency case, the team will see if there are available beds in the nearest hospitals for the specific pathology," explained Minister Medzhidiev.

The system will operate nationwide, and control will be carried out by the Ministry of Health, the Executive Agency for Medical Supervision, and regional health inspections. "The introduction of the system is most important for patients because it will stop the practice of transporting sick people from hospital to hospital in search of available beds," emphasized Dr. Medzhidiev.

The system has been worked on for the past two months, and this is not the first joint project of the two ministries, said Minister of Electronic Governance Georgi Todorov. "With the implementation of this project, we prevent the loss of valuable minutes and seconds, within which a human life can be saved. I am sure that the effect of the system's introduction will quickly become noticeable to people," he added.

The Executive Director of Information Services, Ivaylo Filipov, explained that the National Health Information System, including the newly built hospital registry by IS, is integrated with emergency systems and ambulance GPS. "We have over 350 medical institutions, 52 emergency departments, 3,700 structural hospital departments, 27 emergency medical centers with 170 branches, and over 500 ambulances. All of them are now connected, and all participants in the process can see in real-time the total number of hospital beds, how many are occupied, and how many are free," said Filipov. He also pointed out that on the tablets equipped in all ambulances, the nearest three medical institutions are visualized in real-time, considering the patient's pathology. This way, on one hand, the transportation time of the patient is reduced, and on the other hand, it is ensured that the patient will be hospitalized in a medical institution that can provide quality and timely medical care.