Policy

Zelensky signed the bill on the reform of the MSEC: what will change now

President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy has signed Bill No. 11225, which improves the work of the Medical and Social Expert Commission. This is reported by Komersant ukrainskyi with reference to the map of the draft law on the website of the Verkhovna Rada.

The document, in particular, provides for

• the possibility of a person’s lawyer, legal representative, or rehabilitation doctor being present at the MSEC meeting
• the right to make video and audio recordings of the meeting;
• the requirement to provide a person with a substantiation of the MSEC decision.

It is also envisaged that the Cabinet of Ministers should establish a list of grounds for holding MSEC meetings remotely, on-site or in absentia.

The MSEC reform: what does it involve?

Starting from January 1, 2025, expert teams for assessing the daily functioning of a person will replace the MSEC. The result of their work will be

• one comprehensive document, instead of 12 certificates and extracts in various combinations
• the status of a person with a disability;
• payments, benefits and deferrals to which they are entitled;
• if necessary, auxiliary means of functioning;

The patient’s path from the initial application to the granting of the status of a person with a disability is also changing. If earlier a person communicated with the attending physician of the institution and the institution’s LCC on the way to the MSEC, now on the way to the expert team, he or she will have only the attending physician. And the reference and statistical information previously kept by the doctor in paper form will be displayed on public analytical panels (dashboards).

Moreover, the case, referral, protocol, and decision will now be in electronic form. So will the data of the patient and the doctors who will conduct the assessment (previously they were in paper journals). By the way, they will be hidden from each other until the day of the assessment.

Also, in the course of the reform, expert assessment teams will be placed in powerful multidisciplinary hospitals, while currently the MSECs are located in separate premises.

By the way, such a team will include practicing doctors of various specialties, which are necessary to consider each case of granting a person with disability status. Also, if earlier the commission consisted of 4 to 10 doctors, and their composition was fixed for each patient, now the team of doctors will be selected for each case according to the profile of the case. None of the MSEC chairmen will be able to join such teams.

The process of additional examination of the patient will also change. Previously, this required the MSEC to return to the attending physician for an e-referral. Starting from January 1, 2025, such a referral for additional examinations will be issued by a doctor of the expert team.

And in the process of making a decision, the position of each doctor will be recorded, which will result in a joint decision that will be signed with an electronic signature. If a person is not satisfied with the decision, an appeal can be filed electronically or in paper form at the central level, and not to the regional MSEC, as it was before.