As Poslovni Dnevnik writes, IT expert Marko Rakar spoke on N1 recently about the problem with the Cijepi Se vaccination platform, which, according to reports, doesn’t function at all, and which some larger healthcare institutions across the country have totally given up on using. Health Minister Vili Beros, on the other hand, says that everything is working – maybe not perfectly, maybe not the way they would like, but – it’s still working.
“The question is whether there’s a Cijepi Se vaccination platform at all,” Rakar said at the beginning.
“It’s merely a form on the Internet that doesn’t perform even basic data collection properly. The Ministry’s statement differs drastically from the Minister’s interpretation of it. But the fact it isn’t working has been confirmed by the 200,000 people who signed up, just 5,600 of them were referred through the platform. And 4,000 people, myself included, were wiped off it.
We know the Cijepi Se vaccination platform isn’t working, everyone who has used it has testified that it’s unusable, that it isn’t integrated, that the data is incorrect… It happens that you have to enroll yourself on the platform, and a doctor then has to examine everything and manually transcribe it all somewhere else. What then is the point of the platform? Is it okay for their job to involve retyping something from one screen to another?” Marko Rakar asked.
He said that it has been known for fifteen months now that there will be mass vaccination against the novel coronavirus taking place, and that there has been enough time to organise the system.
“Our Health Ministry is acting as if everything has come as a big surprise for which they’d not prepared. But doctors carry out vaccinations every day on a number of other grounds, on newborns, school children, they do flu vaccinations… It’s unclear how this situation happened. Looking through a series of such bizarre events, we can conclude that someone needed to make some money and deliver something for the sake of something delivered,” Rakar added.
He explained how long it takes to make a platform like the Cijepi Se vaccination platform.
“If we look at it very simply, what people can see through the Cijepi Se page can be done in one afternoon, but what lies behind all of that is much more important – the data must be shared with HZZO’s IT systems, with hospitals, it must be compared with other databases…
However, those are stable, well-documented systems. In seven days this should be able to be done without much trouble. Considering that this has been being talked about for fifteen days now, we’d have been able to develop such a platform twice in that period,” said Rakar.
It is, he added, a very simple task that is repeated every day and which appears very often in the work of people engaged in the development of such systems.
“This application with such specifications is at the level of high school education or for the first or second year of college. There’s no excuse for it not to be working well. The vaccine system isn’t integrated. This means that when you enter an OIB or MBO the system won’t check if you’ve already been vaccinated or not, but this check can happen at later stages. If these people end up being invited again, we can say that it absolutely does not work at all,” said Rakar.
A few days ago, the Health Ministry confirmed that a number of people who had signed up to be vaccinated had been deleted from the Cijepi Se vaccination platform.
“The first 4,000 people who applied were deleted. Of the 4,000 people who were wiped off the system, some must have become infected in the meantime, and someone could have since ended up on a respirator. The question of the responsibility for such a sloppy platform arises. I’ve been involved with informatics for over 30 years and I’ve never seen something so sloppy or irresponsible,” concluded Marko Rakar.
For all you need to know about coronavirus specific to Croatia, including travel, quarantine and border rules, as well as the locations of testing centres across the country, make sure to bookmark our dedicated section.
