With Kristen Michal, Prime Minister of Estonia at his office overlooking Tallinn. We discussed their x-road digital government platform built in Estonia and adopted by 25 other countries.
· Digital signatures save Estonia 2% of GDP each year (!)
· After 20 years of digital voting with no fraud, the majority of Estonians prefer it to paper.
· Finance: tax filing averages 3 minutes (!) 99.6% of all banking transactions are online.
· 99% of health data is digitized. Digitized: prescriptions, ambulance services, patient portal for labs, clinics and hospitals, DNA sequence for 16% of citizens and growing. Healthcare administration consumes 20% of healthcare spend in the U.S and just 1.5% in Estonia and 5% for rest of EU. X-road even allows health care records to work across countries.
· 100% of government services are online, including census, DMV, social services, parking meters, citizen ballot initiatives, fishing and hunting permits, same sex marriage licenses, reporting crime.
· Another feature: a citizen should never have to enter any piece of data more than once as all data services should be federated and up to date.
Estonia has been a leader in digital government services. Why? Coming out of Soviet era, former President Ilves said it best: “you can’t bribe a computer.”
More facts and figures on e-estonia
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