What is e-Nabız?

e-Nabız is the personal health record system operated by the Turkish Ministry of Health. Records created for a patient across different healthcare providers — examination details, diagnoses, procedures, test results, prescriptions and reports — are collected under a single record. Citizens access this record with their own credentials and may grant or revoke physician permission to view their history.

The part that concerns clinics is this: the record does not appear on its own. The provider delivering the service is responsible for reporting it to the Ministry infrastructure. Private practices, polyclinics and medical centres are included. When reporting does not happen, the patient health history stays incomplete and the institution is considered not to have met its obligation.

What gets reported depends on the service. A typical examination sends the protocol record, patient and physician details, diagnosis codes, procedure codes and, where applicable, prescription and report information. Diagnosis and procedure codes are not free text; they are selected from code systems published by the Ministry, and an incorrect code causes the submission to be rejected.

For clinics the real difficulty is continuity rather than technology. Reporting is usually remembered at the end of the day rather than at the moment of service, staff end up entering data into a second system by hand, and rejected submissions go untracked and accumulate. Over time the institution develops gaps in its reporting history that nobody is aware of.

In Dr2connect reporting is not a separate task. Appointment, examination, diagnosis, procedure, prescription and report records already exist in the panel, so the same record is converted into the Ministry format and submitted; staff do not enter data into a second screen. Submission results are logged, and rejected items are listed with their reason so they can be corrected and resent.

The practical outcome is that reporting stops being an end-of-month chore. Once the physician completes the examination the record already exists, and managers see in one screen which submissions went through and which are pending. Because e-Nabız, e-Prescription, e-Report and MBYS all draw on the same patient record, the same information never has to be entered twice.

Because personal health data is involved, access control is part of the process. The panel defines role by role which user can see which patient record, and actions on a record are stored with the user and timestamp. The question of who changed a record and when is answered from the log rather than from memory.

A question new clinics often ask is what happens to existing patients. Records held in spreadsheets, paper files or an older clinic system can be migrated into Dr2connect, and new service records created after migration are reported in the normal flow. Retrospective reporting of historical records is a separate matter and should be assessed against the institution own obligations.