Belarus to offer digital visas in 2016-2017

A system to issue visas online will be created in Belarus in 2016-2017 in accordance with the government program on developing the digital economy and the information society in 2016-2020, BelTA learned from Belarusian Information Technologies and Communications Minister Sergei Popkov on 12 May.

According to the source, the Digital Visa project has been initiated by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The project is supposed to be implemented in 2016-2017. The project will be implemented using public private partnership mechanisms. When the system goes online may be announced after the private partner is chosen, taking into account the partner's financial capabilities.

Apart from that, the government program provides for creating a universal integrated services and transactions system. It will rely heavily on the single system for identifying natural persons and legal persons as well as new personal identification documents aka digital passports. All the necessary identification data will be stored on EMV-compliant plastic cards.

At present the Information Technologies and Communications Ministry is working together with government agencies concerned to determine approaches to the project's implementation. Technical requirements for the data carrier and infrastructure components of the system are being determined to later call a tender to choose the contractor.

In the next five years the development of the system of digital prescriptions using digital signatures will be continued. Sergei Popkov specified that as a side effect the system will help doctors oversee the course of treatment by telling them whether the patient has bought the specified medications or not. At the same time the system will step up oversight over the doctor's actions since doctors will not be able to prescribe more medications than necessary.

"Interaction between the patient and the doctor will not be changed by the introduction of digital prescriptions. Patients will still have to seek doctors, who order medications and give the prescriptions. But patients will not be able to lose the prescriptions since the records will be kept digitally," concluded the Information Technologies and Communications Minister.

BELARUSIAN NEWS