Questions/Answers

The “eBaby” service was deployed through the implementation of the project “Baby, Welcome to the World”. eBaby facilitates the procedure for registration of a newborn and makes it easier for parents. eBaby service is a one-stop-shop that substitutes visits to multiple counters of municipalities, city secretariats, police administrations, branch offices of the National Health Insurance Fund, or average of 7 hours waiting at different counters to register a newborn. Since 2016, when eBaby started, around 180.000 parents received the complete service, thus time savings amount to 1,26 million hours, which equals to 3,78 million euros. The system supporting eBaby service delivery is web based, so all public and private maternity hospitals across Serbia are using it. Newborn registration is simple and at no cost. Parents’ only obligation is to present a valid ID card and agree on the baby’s name. Everything else is done by the nurses through the national eGovernment Portal eUprava. The system, through the service bus, communicates with 7 different agencies in more than 10 transactions and makes sure that the baby is registered in all relevant government databases. Indeed, eBaby supports the procedure for registering a newborn in the Central Registry of Births, registration for compulsory health insurance, registration of residence, application for a health insurance card, and submitting requests for parental allowances and additional benefits provided at local level. Notifications on process steps that are completed are delivered to parents via SMS and e-mail, and all the documents issued including a health insurance card, are delivered at parents’ home address free of charge and at no cost.

The newborn registration is available in every maternity ward in Serbia (about 60), free of charge, and requires parental consent only. Parental consent is necessary, but procedures for rare scenarios such as abandonment at birth are ensured as well to leave no baby without care, legal identity and health insurance. Newborns usually require constant attention and we have provided parents with a possibility to dedicate every available minute to the needs of their newborns instead of collecting documents and waiting at numerous counters, we ensured great uptake of the service and consequently greater proportion of registered newborns in our country.

Our initiative supports the achievement of Social Development Goal No. 16, Target No. 9, “By 2030, provide legal identity for all, including birth registration”, because complicated procedures that require time and money, waiting at counters and unnecessary administrative burden hinder children registration in many cases. Optimization and digitization of administrative procedures, by making it easier to fulfill citizen duties usually result in greater service uptake and more efficient and effective application of regulations. eBaby service supports the procedure for registration of a newborn in the Central Registry of Births, registration of compulsory health insurance, registration of residence and application for a health insurance card, as well as submission of requests for parental allowances and additional benefits provided at local level. By providing legal identity and health insurance, it is ensured that legal rights and protection and health and social protection services are available to all children.

eBaby is fully sustainable system and its operation is based on information sharing and reuse established between all institutions that take part in eBaby service delivery. Nurses from maternity hospitals were provided trainings in the use of the system and Contact Center for Public Administration operating within the Office for IT and eGovernment provides support to them. The deployment of eBaby service haven’t produced any negative impact - there are no additional costs, therefore no negative impact in economic sense. Reduction of administrative burden and paperwork have only positive impact in social and environmental terms, as well as time savings.

Absence of an adequate system for information sharing and reuse within public administration results in services that lack efficiency, and that require great amount of effort for people to protect and fulfill their duties, responsibilities and rights as citizens as well as parents. Deployment of eBaby ensured that institutions share and reuse information already residing within public administration registers and electronic records so parents are not required to wait at numerous counters and collect documents. Instead, they are provided with fully automated service for baby registration and additional related services and offered the opportunity to dedicate every available hour of their time to their newborns, which is necessary since newborns usually require constant care in such a sensitive period immediately after birth. This is particularly important for persons who are illiterate or functionally illiterate as they are unable to follow all the procedures on their own and compile the necessary documentation for the registration of a baby. Likewise, service is equally offered to persons living in remote and underdeveloped areas of the country as well as to those living in the capital. Moreover, legally invisible mothers with no ID documents are registered by the relevant institution in the hospital.

eBaby service implemented through the project “Baby, welcome to the world!” is available to all babies, regardless of their gender, or theirs or their parents race/ethnicity, religion or any other biological, economic or social characteristic or status.

We consider both parents and newborn babies as vulnerable groups due to the specificity of a baby’s birth as a key life event that encompasses postpartum period and family adjustments that need to take place. By facilitating and automating several administrative procedures relevant to birth of a baby as a life event, eBaby service provides parents with an opportunity to dedicate all their time to their babies, while ensuring that procedures for acquisition of a legal identity, health insurance, and parental allowances are triggered and executed with minimal parental effort. Ensuring easy and free access to legal identity from the first day of life of a newborn has potentially far-reaching consequences that do not affect only that child but can affect children that that child will have in future. Aside from allowing a child legal rights and protection, health and social protection and services including food aid and child benefits and access to education, it protects rights of their future descendants that child could have in future. Failing to ensure legal identity for one child potentially can create a circle of people existing and living outside of system and deprived of basic rights and freedoms.

eBaby service that supports service delivery for the registration of a newborn and application for parental allowances and additional benefits provided at local level was launched in 2016 and was rolled out in two phases through the implementation of the project “Baby, welcome to the world”. Successful completion of the first phase resulted in the deployment of the digital service for registration of a newborn in the Central Registry of Births, registration of compulsory health insurance, registration of residence and application for a health insurance card. The service was available in maternity wards and healthcare institutions from the very beginning. The second phase started in 2018 of the project implementation enabled submission of requests for parental allowances and other benefits provided at local level (in cities and municipalities). eBaby IS integrated information from maternity wards, centers for social work and child care offices, linked the databases of the Ministry of Public Administration and Local Self-Government, the Ministry of Interior, the Central Registry of Compulsory Social Insurance and the National Health Insurance Fund. By the end of 2018 in all hospitals it was possible to apply for parental allowances.

The project was thoroughly planned to mitigate and reduce potential implementation risks. eBaby service is implemented in maternity wards and hospitals, and we were prepared far in advance for challenges with regard to practical use of the system in healthcare institutions, since nurses in remote parts of Serbia in many cases have only scarce computer skills. We had to ensure trainings in the use of eBaby for about 282 nurses, and ensure adequate day-to-day support for them for every technical problem they potentially come across in their work. Day-to-day support is provided by the Contact Center for Public Administration.

By enabling a set of the baby birth-related services to be triggered at once, while still in hospital, completely paperless, for free, without a need to wait at numerous counters, without a need to pay a visit to any institution, without paying charges or fees for any document copy, this initiative is highly innovative. All notifications on issued documents and service delivery process steps are delivered via SMS or e-mail, whereas all the documents and a health insurance card of a baby are delivered at parents’ home address, all free of charge.

We weren’t inspired by similar initiatives, we were inspired by “once only” principle, because at the time of the project preparation a new law was in draft. The Law on General Administrative Procedure that came into force in 2016 obliged public administration to share and reuse information from public registries and electronic records ex officio. When considering its application and areas where additional optimization would allow great results, we realized that if we expand the scope a bit, that is, if we establish a new information system and train nurses in its use, we can ensure very effective end-to-end service.

That information isn’t available to us, yet many countries expressed their interest in eBaby considering its uniqueness and highly innovative setup and we’ve been invited to other countries to present our initiative. I.e., we presented it to the countries of North Africa in Morocco and in Ukraine, and we provided their officials with advice on necessary legal, organizational and technical framework to enable the eBaby rollout. We hosted several foreign delegations (such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Luxembourg) interested in eBaby in Serbia as well and provided them with our know-how and advice. Now Serbia has comprehensive knowledge sharing cooperation program “Serbia Digitalizes” and through the program we offer our eBaby expertise as well.

It is fully adaptable yet some organizational adjustments are needed to enable service provision in maternity hospitals and wards, including trainings in the use of the information system and a center that can provide necessary technical support to nurses. There may be a need for some legal adjustments to enable “once only” principle application. Regarding technical preconditions, it is necessary to link all institutions that take part in the service delivery, and there possibly may be a need to deploy eGovernment infrastructure for information sharing and reuse though in Serbia existing national eGovernment portal infrastructure is being used.

eBaby service is designed to utilize existing national eGovernment infrastructure, that is, the eGovernment Portal eUprava and government service bus for public administration information sharing and reuse, therefore the only additional cost was for the trainings that were conducted. Additional human resources weren’t necessary because the entire procedure lasts a few minutes and doesn’t represent a significant additional burden to nurses taking into account that number of newborns has dropped significantly in recent decades.

The initiative is sustainable since it relies on existing eGovernment infrastructure – national eGovernment Portal eUprava, government service bus, Contact Center for Public Administration, and public administration and healthcare institutions. It does not take additional costs nor additional human resources at the moment. Serbian government is currently implementing several mechanisms to increase the natality rate, and if those prove successful, we will be happy to ensure adequate number of additional staff. Moreover, this service is one of the most appreciated e-government services by citizens of Serbia.

Yes

We regularly monitor the performance of all eGovernment services that are offered, including eBaby. Almost 180.000 parents used the service and around 97% have been completed successfully. Moreover, eBaby is always mentioned by international insitutions and partners (i.e. EU Delegation, SIGMA) as the example of best practice in all reports about Serbia.Importantly, parents report high satisfaction of the service.

eBaby provides a tool to monitor and evaluate the performance of successful service completion. About 90% of parents opt to use eBaby channel instead of other service provision channel. Up to now, around 200,000 babies have been registered through eBaby, and around 180.000 parents used the complete service. Parents express their level of satisfaction or leave the comments on eGovernment Portal or on the website of the Government. According to the information collected, the level of satisfaction is very high, even though we are aware of the limits of a lack of a comprehensive mechanisms for user satisfaction.

“Baby, welcome to the world!” project was thoroughly planned and implemented to establish a comprehensive system and set up procedures in a way that can ensure service delivery sustainability with minimal utilization of additional resources. Moreover, a constant interaction with service providers in hospitals and established feedback mechanism give us opportunity to adjust service to the user needs, both in terms of technical implementation and information provided. Moreover, through a contact form for citizens on the website of the Government of Serbia we receive comments, votes, suggestions and feedback from parents and act accordingly.

Upon parents’ consent, a set of baby birth-related services is triggered. A nurse accesses the back-office of eGovernment Portal eUprava and with a few clicks starts the procedure for registering a newborn in the Central Registry of Births, registration for compulsory health insurance, registration of residence, application for a health insurance card, and submitting requests for parental allowances and additional benefits provided at local level. Notifications on process steps that are completed are delivered to parents via SMS and e-mail, and all the documents issued including a health insurance card, are delivered at their home address free of charge. eBaby service relies on information sharing platform – government service bus – and information sharing obligations established by the Law on General Administrative Procedure and its bylaws. This project has just expanded the scope and application of information sharing and reuse in order to enable the service to be triggered from maternity wards and hospitals.

The provision of eBaby service which is designed and implemented as user-friendly and truly end-to-end service available across the entire territory of Serbia is possible only when collaboration of all institutions participating in service delivery is ensured. Therefore it was necessary to establish cooperation between all institutions involved – Ministry of Health, maternity hospitals and every healthcare institution having maternity ward in Serbia, the Office for Information Technologies and Electronic Government, its Contact Center for Public Administration, Ministry for Public Administration and Local Self-Government, municipalities, city secretariats, Ministry of Interior, police administrations, National Health Insurance Fund, its branch offices, etc.

We learned that in some cases it is true that “a little goes a long way”. Sometimes even without much additional resources it is possible to optimize services and to provide complete, user-friendly and end-to-end service that ensure easy access to important procedures such as those for acquiring legal identity and protection and health and social protection of newborns.