From Paper to the Cloud: How to Digitize Healthcare in Poland

Will patients be able to manage their health as easily as they manage their finances through online banking? The tools include: online registration, IKP, the cloud, and artificial intelligence. The problem lies in fragmented records and ingrained habits. This was the conclusion reached by experts during the debate “From Paper to the Cloud,” organized by “Rzeczpospolita” and the Institute for Eastern Studies—the main organizer of the Economic Forum in Karpacz.

In Poland’s healthcare system, patients sometimes act as couriers for their own medical records: they arrive at a doctor’s appointment carrying a folder of test results or a file from a private clinic, only to find that the hospital’s system cannot read it. What needs to happen for medical systems to start communicating with one another? These were the issues discussed during the debate “From Paper to the Cloud: The Digital Future of Healthcare in Poland.” The discussion was moderated by Dr. Piotr Bromber of the University of Zielona Góra and Marcin Piasecki, managing editor of Rzeczpospolita. At the outset, Dr. Bromber outlined a range of challenges: reliance on paper records, costs, genuinely making healthcare professionals’ work easier and improving patient convenience, data integration, patient data security, and the quality of legal regulations.

Deputy Minister of Health Tomasz Maciejewski saw the roots of the problem not only in technology but also in established habits and data quality. “There are many problems. I’ll start with healthcare professionals’ habit of working with paper documents, because we have not fully digitized all the documents we provide to patients. The format of the data exchanged between healthcare institutions is not yet ideal either,” he admitted. He recalled that the P1 platform is already in operation and that healthcare providers are required to report medical events to it, while patients can access their information through the Internet Patient Account (IKP). “At present, we do not have sanctions that we can fully enforce when these reporting obligations are not met,” he said, explaining why the treatment history available in the system remains incomplete.

Later in the debate, he returned to the issue, this time speaking as a physician rather than a deputy minister. “This is also a human issue, because we do not always attach sufficient importance to the medical documentation we produce. And that is one reason why the data is incomplete,” he said. Unless the quality of the data entered improves, no cloud solution will fulfill its purpose. It is therefore necessary to convince the medical community that these solutions are not intended to generate more bureaucracy but will genuinely help them. Waldemar Grudzień, president of CompuGroup Medical Polska, offered a similar assessment. “Today, a doctor collects an enormous amount of data. The benefit should be that they can access a complete set of information about a patient’s treatment very quickly, that the information is reliable and that conclusions can be drawn from it to help treat the patient and speed up the treatment process,” he said. He added that it is crucial to make data entry as simple as possible, so doctors spend as little time as possible duplicating information and data can flow from one system to another. So when will the different IT systems used by healthcare facilities finally begin communicating, removing the need for patients to carry their medical records from place to place?

“This is the biggest problem with digitization as a whole,” replied Deputy Minister of Digital Affairs Dariusz Standerski. “If I had to identify a single obstacle to introducing new electronic services, it would be the lack of communication between systems and registries. How can we change that? I don’t have good news. Work in this area is always painstaking, always difficult, and takes a great deal of time,” he acknowledged. In his assessment, rapid progress will only be possible once registries have been put in order and a common standard has been implemented. Deputy Minister Standerski also discussed how artificial intelligence should be used in practice for transcription and workflow automation, while retaining human oversight.

Waiting Lists, Online Registration, and Early Results

The Deputy Minister of Health returned to waiting lists and patient convenience when discussing the pilot program for centralized electronic appointment registration. SMS inquiries are already being sent, and a chatbot will soon communicate with patients. This creates additional appointment availability without increasing the number of doctors. Tomasz Maciejewski also cited the ability to choose a healthcare facility as another benefit.

Dr. hab. Anna Kowalczuk, deputy president of the Agency for Health Technology Assessment and Tariff System (AOTMiT), explained how digitization is changing the work of the institution responsible for health technology assessment and setting healthcare service tariffs.

Digitization is the foundation of modern health technology assessment: it provides access to large, interoperable datasets, enables the use of AI and real-world evidence (RWE), and integrates decision-making processes in healthcare. This allows AOTMiT to pursue its strategy of strengthening the role of health technology assessment (HTA) in reimbursement decisions with greater precision and a stronger evidence base.

“In carrying out our day-to-day tasks, we rely on data, which is an essential component of health technology assessment. Real-world evidence (RWE) is extremely valuable. It provides additional information about the effectiveness and safety of treatment in clinical practice, supplementing our knowledge and often offering insights beyond those obtained from clinical trials,” she emphasized. This is why it is so important for data to be complete, high-quality, standardized, and collected consistently. Missing or incomparable data significantly hampers analysis and decision-making.

AOTMiT has established an AI team and a Data Hub focused on achieving operational excellence, which in practice means:

• implementing tools for rapid data processing and generating analyses from datasets,
• integrating analytical systems with national and European databases,
• using AI for health technology assessment and the analysis of real-world evidence and data (RWE/RWD), which is crucial for innovative medical devices and digital solutions.

The benefits of digitization—visible most quickly to patients and, over a longer period, to the healthcare system as a whole—are certain and will continue to grow as the data ecosystem matures, she stressed.

More Data Means More Responsibility

Jakub Kraszewski, director of the University Clinical Center in Gdańsk, discussed digitization from the perspective of a large teaching hospital. He noted that the volume of collected data is growing almost without limit. This is precisely why hospitals are looking for cloud solutions to accommodate expanding repositories of images and records, including examination results. “Standardization and accurate mapping of processes produce tangible organizational benefits. The system is designed to prevent us from repeating certain activities and wasting effort and resources, which are always in short supply in healthcare,” he said. The same staff can manage more hospitalizations when information flows more efficiently and data is not scattered across discs and binders. At the same time, Kraszewski reminded participants that digitization requires preparation for system failures. There must be a procedure for quickly switching to paper documentation and subsequently entering those records into the system. Interestingly, hospitals also need to train younger staff in analog procedures. “We employ young people who are unfamiliar with these procedures because they have never seen them carried out on paper. We run drills: they take printed forms out of a special cabinet, and it turns out that what we thought was easier to do on paper is virtually impossible for them,” he admitted.

Above all, IT systems should enable better use of scarce resources, repeatedly emphasized Piotr Ciski, president of Symfonia Group. “An IT system should optimize the use of resources that are scarce: access to doctors, doctors’ expertise, access to tests, and access to high-quality consultations,” he said. For that reason, he cannot imagine returning to paper-based processes today, for example for appointment bookings. Ciski pointed out that IT systems have limitations because they are only tools and must be used properly. Establishing standards, including for cloud solutions, is a prerequisite. “We need to know which systems are overseen by the ministry, which are data warehouses, and who can feed data into them and how. But we could safely leave the final stage—what happens in clinics and hospitals—to companies,” he argued. Regarding security, Piotr Ciski noted that the weakest link in most cases is the human factor, including password quality and rules for using systems. “Even if we have a system running in a single cloud in Poland, we can envisage another backup system within the European Union, for example in another country, so that we can switch over very quickly and manage the infrastructure securely,” he explained. Waldemar Grudzień added an economic perspective: “ERP systems have been used in hospitals for many years. It is important to skillfully combine financial data with patient treatment data. This allows us to identify which procedures are financially beneficial, where money is lost or earned, which departments are performing well, and where something needs to be optimized.”

Professor Paweł Ptaszyński, deputy director for medical and organizational affairs at the Central Clinical Hospital in Łódź, warned against digitization for its own sake. “There has to be some benefit. The best approach is win-win: the patient benefits, the system benefits, and the staff benefit,” he said. He referred to practical experiences with implementing a chatbot and digital channels for communicating with patients. He also noted that the image of older people as digitally excluded can be oversimplified: “People in their eighties have often had mobile phones for 20 years and manage them perfectly well,” he observed.

Cyberattacks and the Sale of Data

During the part of the debate devoted to cybersecurity, Piotr Bromber asked directly whether medical records are safe. “Attacks on hospital systems are roughly as frequent as attacks on banking systems and other systems. Every system is a target,” said director Kraszewski. Discussions of data security often focus on data being locked or traded, whereas the most serious consequence for patients is the paralysis of a hospital. “With hospitals now so heavily dependent on technology, even moving around a hospital where everything operates with access cards can become impossible in the event of such an attack,” Kraszewski argued. Another serious risk from the patient’s perspective is the sale of data, for example to an insurance company or the banking sector. According to Kraszewski, the response must include both technical procedures and what he called the epidemiology of cybersecurity: consistent user habits at work and at home.

The debate repeatedly returned to the question of how ready Polish patients are to take charge of managing their own health, and whether complicated tools might discourage them. According to Deputy Minister Maciejewski, end users must be involved in designing solutions. “Users need to be able to provide feedback at the design stage, because they are the ones who will use the applications every day,” he argued. The second element is broad-based education, from young people to seniors. Anna Kowalczuk added that AOTMiT is finalizing training for patients and patient organizations so they can pass on knowledge about safe data donation to others.

Will patients be able to manage their health as easily as they manage a bank account today? According to Deputy Minister of Health Tomasz Maciejewski, everyday realities will force this change. “If patients see a benefit, if it appeals to them, they will use it,” Professor Ptaszyński observed.

The debate revealed a broad consensus on the direction of change: moving from paper to the cloud, and from fragmented, incomplete data to structured documentation that supports analysis, facilitates work organization, and improves security. The key questions today are how quickly registries can be brought into order, how standards can be established, and how patients and healthcare professionals can be guided through this transition so that technology genuinely reduces the burden on the healthcare system rather than becoming another layer of bureaucracy.