From 1 November, hospitals are required to submit hourly schedules of medical staff working time to the National Health Fund (NFZ). Refusing to do so carries penalties.
Until now, the NFZ received hourly reports from outpatient clinics, while hospitals submitted weekly summaries. As PAP reported, this meant that there were cases of doctors working in two facilities at the same time. The new obligation is meant to limit such situations.
What exactly hospitals must report
Facilities must report the days, and the start and end hours, during which persons practising medical professions provide services. The obligation covers providers of inpatient treatment, regardless of the scope of services. The data is submitted retroactively, to the relevant regional branches of the NFZ.
The first summary, for November, must be delivered by hospitals by 20 December. Subsequent ones are to be sent to the fund monthly, by the same deadline.
Legal basis and reporting method
The obligation was introduced by an amendment to the regulation of the Minister of Health on the general conditions of contracts for the provision of healthcare services. According to PAP, it was published in August, and the change is part of a package announced in July by Health Minister Jolanta Sobierańska-Grenda. The draft went to public consultation on 20 July. As the Nasz Tomaszów portal reports, the regulation is dated 25 August and was published in the Journal of Laws under item 1137; it adds a new § 6a to the general conditions of contracts.
The NFZ has provided several equivalent ways of transmitting data, including via the Provider Portal and automatically, through direct data exchange between the hospital’s system and the fund’s branch system. An XML message called CZPR is used for automatic exchange. NFZ spokesman Jakub Gołąb, quoted by PAP, assured that the fund has already published an implementation message and technical specification so that hospitals and software vendors can prepare their systems in advance. According to him, the XML format makes it possible to integrate reporting with existing working time recording tools.
Penalties for failing to comply
Hospitals that fail to report on time face contractual penalties. As rynekzdrowia.pl reports, these may reach 2 percent; according to the Nasz Tomaszów portal, this refers to 2 percent of the contract. The Ministry of Health justified the draft by stating that data on the actual time of service provision will help the NFZ on an ongoing basis to analyse whether services are delivered in line with the staff schedules declared in the contract.
What it means
For hospital directors and HR departments, this means adapting systems for recording and exporting working hours, with the first deadline falling on 20 December. For doctors working in several facilities, schedules will be easier for the fund to compare, so overlapping hours may be detected. For patients, the change introduces no new procedures. Its goal is to verify whether the staff declared in the contract actually provide services.
