April 20, 2023

The field of health is no exception to the general process of digitization of daily services. The advent of e-prescribing will definitely change patient habits by gradually moving away from the classic pattern of paper prescriptions, a new habit to take!

What is the electronic prescription?

The e-prescription can be defined as being a dematerialization of the path of a patient’s prescription between the doctor and the various health professionals who will receive the recommendations of the latter (pharmacists, nurses, etc.).

The doctor must use software to enter the content of the prescription so that it can be transmitted securely to other healthcare professionals. A QR code is then sent to the patient to enable him to collect his medication from the pharmacy.

Regarding the consultation, no major changes to report. The changes are especially present in the internal process and in the circuit that the order carries out. The patient will therefore not experience major upheavals.

What are the advantages of e-prescribing?

The implementation of this new tool promises advantages, in particular two:

Creating an electronic prescription helps physicians avoid making errors by using predefined prescription templates.

This also has a positive effect for the pharmacists on the other side of the process who will be able to organize themselves better by preparing the medicines or medical devices requested in advance for the patients. The latter can choose the pharmacy to collect their medication directly with the doctor.

In terms of security, e-prescribing will help protect the circuit for creating and transmitting prescriptions between the prescriber and the pharmacies or hospitals. The latter will navigate through different secure servers to reach its endpoint without risking patient data compromise.

The security of patient data being a major issue, the software used for this process is equipped with advanced security systems. Security is also often one of the major points of concern in digitization processes, especially within public services that are required to handle sensitive information, here health data.

What regarding the generalization of electronic prescriptions?

The objective for the next few years within the territory of the European Union is to set up and generalize this tool so that it becomes the standard in the long term.

In France, the e-prescription is registered in the “National Health Strategy 2018-2022”it is one of the government’s priorities with regard to the modernization of the health sector. Regarding the timetable for the application of this measure, pharmacists had until March 15 to order the software and have until April 28, 2023 to implement it.

to finish the final generalization of the e-prescription is scheduled for December 31, 2024 by Health Insurance.

The implementation of e-prescription is therefore a fully topical innovation that will gradually see the light of day in France and on the territory of the European Union.

By simplifying and securing the process and the circuit used by medical prescriptions, e-prescription presents itself as an additional advance in the objective of digitizing daily services.

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