Prime Minister Ratas stressed the importance of digital cooperation. “Our bilateral cooperation is increasingly more active, but we could also accomplish a more advanced data exchange. Estonia and Finland already exchange digital prescriptions, but tax data, business registers, and population registers still offer endless opportunities. The Nordic countries and the Baltic states could very well become a most digitally connected region in the world.”

How does data exchange between two or more countries work?

The backbone of e-Estonian digital services is X-road. Invisible yet crucial, it allows the nation’s various public and private sector e-service information systems to link up and function in harmony. Today, X-road is implemented in eleven countries: Estonia, Finland, Japan, Iceland, Faroe islands, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Palestine, Vietnam, Argentina and El Salvador.

Several X-Road ecosystems can be joined together, federated. Federation is a one to one relationship between two ecosystems. Members of the federated ecosystems can publish and consume services with each other as if they were members of the same ecosystem. Federation enables easy and secure cross-border data exchange between these ecosystems. That is what is done when exchanging digital prescriptions between Estonia and Finland.

You can read more about Estonia’s interoperability services on e-Estonia’s website.