TEHIK launches up to 28 million euro overhaul of SKAIS systems

Estonia’s Health and Welfare Information Systems Centre, known as TEHIK, has opened a procurement process to close the country’s old SKAIS1 social protection system and gradually move its services to SKAIS2 or other suitable information systems, ERR reports.

The framework agreement has a maximum value of 28 million euros over five years. TEHIK stressed that this is an upper limit and not an amount that will automatically be spent once the agreement is signed.

SKAIS2 is used by the Social Insurance Board to calculate and pay benefits, family allowances, pensions and maintenance assistance. The system became notorious more than a decade ago because of delayed development deadlines and rising costs.

TEHIK SKAIS programme manager Juta Urbalu said SKAIS1 had reached the end of its technical life and no longer met current requirements.

“It is not sensible to keep repairing this system indefinitely,” Urbalu told ERR. SKAIS1 and SKAIS2 currently operate side by side, requiring the state to maintain two technology environments, their interfaces and related processes. This increases the workload, cost and technical risk, she said.

According to TEHIK welfare division head Epp Laanepõld, SKAIS1 is an old system used mainly by officials, while SKAIS2 is newer and also supports the Social Insurance Board’s self-service portal and several current electronic services. The self-service system, data exchange and flexibility of the system will also be developed further.

The procurement is divided into five parts covering benefits, including the calculation logic for allowances and pensions; technical work on the new architecture; finance; user channels and general components; and a general section for larger developments to be ordered through separate competitions.

Specific work will be commissioned according to need and available funding through separate contracts. Developments costing more than 600,000 euros will be reopened for competition among the framework agreement partners.

SKAIS1 still contains about 15 services. Urbalu said a plan had been established for where and in what order each service would be moved. The largest and most complex is the old-age pension service, which has more than 320,000 recipients.

The services will be transferred from SKAIS1 gradually, with the necessary data preserved. TEHIK plans to close the old system completely in 2028.

The technical platform of SKAIS2 also needs updating. The system currently uses an Oracle database platform, but the plan is to move gradually to the open-source PostgreSQL platform.