Health Minister Vladimír Lengvarský appointed new management of the National Health Information Centre (NCZI). He abolished the position of director general, held for over a year by Peter Lukáč, and from 1 January appointed a collective body - a three-member board of directors. Its members are Marek Macho and Barbora Mareková, the third position is not yet filled.
The new crisis management is tasked with monitoring the current situation and identifying the reasons why key projects are delayed. At the same time, the Ministry is sending an audit to the NCZI, which will focus primarily on the processes within the organisation itself.
As Aktuality.sk pointed, the centre is a key institution in the electronicisation of healthcare, so-called eHealth, which is not fully functioning even after many years and the investment of millions of euros.
This is the fifth change of NCZI leadership in the past three years, which is key in the implementation of eHealth. The first change in personnel occurred shortly after the new government took office in 2020, when the then director resigned. The new head of the NCZI quit after less than a year and his tenure was marked by the leak of data on people who had been tested for coronavirus. The dismissal came after the centre failed to prepare the vaccination registration system so that it worked smoothly from the start.
His successor was in office for an even shorter time, just two and a half months. Lengvarsky, then a fresh minister, abruptly removed him from office. This was after the director publicly criticised, for example, the fact that the NCZI did not receive financial support even for the text messages it sends to people. He compared this to antigen testing, on which almost EUR 500 million was spent. However, the ministry gave a different, official reason for the appeal.
Another of the interim directors failed in the regular selection procedure - the one in which Lukáč again succeeded.
The selection procedure itself attracted media interest because the sieve was surprisingly an English language test. Eight of the ten candidates failed it and could not continue to the next part of the audition. One of the unsuccessful candidates was Barbora Mareková.
Source: Aktuality.sk
