The world of prescriptions is one of the more adaptive areas of healthcare, with the likes of Amazon entering the space to try and make the process of ordering and receiving medication much smoother.
Getting prescriptions when travelling has not always been easy however, but a recent EU announcement aims to make it more so. The first of what will hopefully be a wider rollout of a digital prescription service has been launched that will allow Finnish patients to retrieve medicine that had been prescribed in Finland from a pharmacy in Estonia.
“I very much welcome the first step in the exchange of ePrescriptions between Finland and Estonia. Sharing ePrescriptions and Patient Summaries will be crucial for patient safety as it can help doctors to better understand a foreign patient’s medical history and can reduce the risks of incorrect medication and the costs of duplicate tests.The Commission will continue its support to expand these exchanges across the EU,” the European Commission say.
A starting point
Whilst the project is relatively small thus far, it is part of a much wider initiative by the EU to ensure that care is continuous for all EU citizens regardless of the European country they’re currently in. The initiative aims to ensure that health data is transferable across the EU, and exchanged in a secure and efficient way.
This has led to a number of projects to help achieve this aim, including ePrescription and eDispensation projects that allow any EU citizen to collect their medication from a pharmacy in any other member state. There are also projects aimed at making important information about each individual available via the the European Health Record and the European Commission plan to publish recommendations shortly for the European Electronic Health Record Exchange Format.
Both of these projects sit on top of the eHealth Digital Service Infrastructure, which aims to connect up the digital health services of each member state, thus allowing health data to be easily exchanged. To date, 22 member states are party to the project, with all expected to subscribe to the ePrescriptions and Patient Summaries by the end of 2021 at the latest.
