Minister of Health Gudlaugur Thór Thórdarson submitted the first electronic prescription in Iceland at a special ceremony at the Health Care Center in Selfoss, south Iceland, yesterday. Electronic prescriptions will be used in all parts of the country early next year.
“It is a big step towards modernizing trade practices in this field and it will, among other things, increase competition,” Thórdarson said at the ceremony, Morgunbladid reports.
Sigurdur Jónsson, director of the Federation of Trade and Services, said he was pleased with the stage reached yesterday; adding electronic prescriptions would improve professional supervision.
The use of electronic prescriptions has been tested since 2001, first in Húsavík, northeast Iceland, and later in Akureyri and neighboring towns. Doctors and pharmacies who have participated in the project agree that the arrangement has many advantages.
The arrangement means that instead of receiving a conventional prescription for a specific pharmacy, the patient can go to any pharmacy to collect his or her medicine, because the doctor sends it to a special database which the pharmacies have access to.
If the patient does not collect his or her medicine within 30 days, the prescription will be deleted from the database.
Prescriptions which can be used many times will stay in the database until they are used up, and then they will also be deleted to prevent the database from storing unnecessary information.
