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Friday, 29.03.2024, 09:50
Finnish digital prescriptions to become valid in Estonia from Monday
Estonians will be given the opportunity to
buy prescription drugs with a digital prescription in a pharmacy in Finland
during 2019. With this, Estonia and Finland will become the two first countries
in Europe to exchange prescription data between one another.
"Today will mark the start of the cross-border movement
of electronic health data in Europe. Estonia and Finland as the first countries
will launch a service that will enable to purchase medicinal products in
another country with a digital prescription," Estonian Minister of Health
and Labor Riina Sikkut said. "Agreements entered into in Europe will
become real solutions that in the future will enable health data to move with
people and through that ensure better quality healthcare to mlns of people in
Europe who travel, study or work in another European country. This is what we
were working in the name of during the Estonian presidency," she added.
According to the minister, the launch of the cross-border
exchange of prescriptions is a historic milestone, but still only the first
step on a long road. "Already in the next few years, we wish to enable the
forwarding of other health data, too, so that when a problem emerges in a
foreign country, doctors have access to an overview of the person's
medical history," Sikkut added.
By Monday, Estonia has finished a solution that will enable
Estonian pharmacists to ask in their information system for a digital
prescription issued in another European country. The plan during 2019 is
to create the possibility of purchasing medicinal products with a digital
prescription issued in Estonia in a foreign country, which will be possible in
the first stage in Finland, Cyprus, Greece and Portugal.
The cross-border exchange of prescription data is part of a
project initiated in 2017, the aim of which is to ensure a better quality
healthcare and availability of medicinal products to people in a foreign
country thanks to data moving electronically. At that, the person will retain
the possibility of restricting the movement of their health data between
various countries.
The project foresees that by 2021, the cross-border
forwarding of digital prescriptions and overviews of the medical histories of
patients will be enabled across a data exchange platform managed by the
European Commission. Altogether 23 countries in Europe have joined the project
so far, the countries are also planning to carry out the necessary development
over the next three years.
In Estonia, the cross-border prescription exchange service
has been developed by the Health and Welfare Information Systems Center
(TEHIK) in cooperation with the Agency of Medicines and the Estonian Health
Insurance Fund. Tonis Jaagus, head of the health division of the e-services management
department at TEHIK, said that this is a complex project as, when building up
the data exchange, things that had to be taken into account included various
countries' registers concerning medicinal products and prescriptions as well as
the rules and characteristics of the medicinal products' market. "By now,
the countries participating in the project have agreed on joint rules, the
system has been created and the unique transnational data exchange service in
the health field is open for people," Jaagus said.
TEHIK has cooperated closely with developers of pharmacy
software, informed and trained pharmacists and by now, Estonian pharmacies are
prepared to sell medicinal products on the basis of digital prescriptions
issued in Finland. So far, it has been possible to purchase prescription
medicinal products aboard only on the basis of a paper prescription. Over 3,000
medicinal products per year are bought in Estonia on the basis of a paper
prescription issued in another European Union country.
The cross-border health data exchange project is being
co-financed from the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF).