The previous electronic transmission of prescriptions as part of e-medication should end in July and only the new e-prescription should apply. But there is a shift in the room, because if the actual plans were implemented, there would have been a risk of traffic jams in the pharmacies.
The reason is essentially the lack of readers. The Chamber of Pharmacists warns of a “fiasco”, as President Ulrike Mursch-Edlmayr puts it.
The chairman of the conference of social insurance carriers, Peter Lehner, sharply rejected the allegations of the pharmacist chamber on Thursday. The system works. However, support for a postponement came from the Medical Association. There are currently still too many open questions and construction sites, explained Johannes Steinhart, Vice President of the Austrian Medical Association and Federal Curia Chairman of the resident doctors. Steinhart advocated postponing the introduction by at least three months.
The postponement – the chamber is demanding it by the end of the year – is not yet fixed. However, the coalition introduced an amendment to the Health Telematics Act in the National Council on Wednesday. Although this is almost without content, it serves as a so-called “carrier rocket”, which means that real content can still be introduced in the event of a political agreement before the decision is made.
Time is of the essence and what is actually needed is a resolution in a special session of the National Council or a retrospective regulation if the amendment is passed in July with transitional regulations. Because the current legal situation is that from July 1st only the e-prescription will apply.
As Mursch-Edlmayr explains, this would have unpleasant consequences for the patients. Because with e-medication it is also sufficient if you verbally state the social security number, which, for example, can also be used by relatives to pick up the preparation. This can be typed in and the pharmacist sees the doctor’s prescription.
With the e-prescription, which itself has been in the introductory phase for some time, the e-card is needed if the physicians do not print out the prescription, which is becoming increasingly rare. This must then be plugged in so that the pharmacy can read which preparation was prescribed for the patient.
Ambiguity about readers
In and of itself, that wouldn’t be such a big problem, but there are gaps. According to Mursch-Edlmayr, 5,000 card readers are missing and the supplier cannot deliver them before September or October. Some 100 pharmacies only have one reader at all. Customer queues are foreseeable. The President says that “complete chaos” would break out on the backs of the patients.
Although there are theoretically alternatives that are referred to by the social security system, such as a separate app, these are hardly known to the general public.
According to Mursch-Edlmayr, there are also deficiencies in the implementation of the e-prescription, specifically in the case of drug prescriptions, which cannot currently be mapped. This also applies to heavy painkillers. Problems in nursing homes or with people in mobile care are inevitable. The same applies to inhalers or infusion devices.
Lehner called the allegations by the Chamber of Pharmacies “panic mongering” and “deliberate misinformation” that created uncertainty among all those involved. The e-prescription has “already been successfully introduced throughout Austria” and works. 1.2 million e-prescriptions were issued last week. 97 percent of pharmacies and 85 percent of medical practices are already using it, says Lehner: “We are currently in the final phase of the rollout process, which will take several months.”
But the Medical Association also expressed serious concerns on Thursday: “Introduction of the e-prescription at the beginning of July means chaos with announcement. Everyone involved would have to pay for the omissions and unresolved questions. Unnecessarily, one would cause great confusion and frustration,” says Medical Association Vice Steinhart . A postponement of three months should be enough “to treat the still existing teething problems, provided those responsible finally take the problems seriously enough”.
Source: Nachrichten
