Who are the major public administration signatories? Probably no one signs the amount of documents that are the daily bread of doctors and these signatures generate a volume of costs and social implications that are unmatched in other sectors. Just think, just by way of example, that you are alive or dead on the basis of a doctor's signature, that you died of a natural death or by homicide if a doctor says so, that you do not appear before a judge or you even leave a prison with a health certificate. Each analysis request sheet, for a drug, in short, every "binding" commits the region to pay for the execution of an examination or for a drug, the total value of the whole is many billions of euros and all this is based on only one thing: the doctor's signature (and stamp).
Talking about dematerialization in the health sector cannot be done without considering the value of the sector and imagining being able to do all this without signed documents is not only an illusion but also dangerous for citizens. A misalignment of a database is enough to have electronic prescriptions registered to the wrong people, and, believe me, since the certificates of disability have to be entered online, creating false invalids is even easier. The only tool that "mitigates" the risk is the fact that medical commissions do not trust online certifications and "demand" the production of traditional paper certificates, with stamp and signature, with the "advantage" of having doubled the work, unsigned online certifications and signed paper certifications.
How to conclude this short flash? We would like to have a space for doctors at the table of decision-makers of the Digital Administration Code who carefully consider healthcare dematerialisation, with a signature that must be easy to affix, which can be affixed in "unsafe" IT environments such as hospital surgeries, executable "for the street", even with tablets and smartphones (smart cards do not enter my iPAD 🙂 ) which guarantees the doctor and the patient that the document has not been altered. For now, remote signature seems to be the right choice, we are open, the only choice not to be made is to… abolish the doctor's signature.
