Who does not know them, the prescriptions with the doctor’s scrawny signature, which you take to the pharmacy of your choice. But as Gematik, the software service provider of the Federal Ministry of Health has now announced, this is also to be a thing of the past by the beginning of July 2021. In a documentation of several hundred pages, they published the technical specifications and tasks that have to be fulfilled to enable manufacturers and suppliers to develop the corresponding products.
Special focus is placed on the sale of prescription drugs and data protection. The document, which is now to bring digitalisation to pharmacies, was produced in cooperation with the Federal Office for Information Security and the Federal Commissioner for Data Protection.
Experts and the media praise the concept of gematics here as a generally binding and barrier-free approach, which should ensure greater efficiency in the process to date.
The way to the electronic recipe
The doctor creates the electronic prescription, which contains a QR code, in his corresponding practice software and gives it to the patient either printed out or as a QR code on an app. In the app, the pharmacy to which he will go is selected directly to give the pharmacy the time to purchase the medication. The patient can then choose whether he/she wants the medicine delivered (if possible) or whether he/she wants to pick it up with the printout or ePrescription. The QR Code enables the pharmacist to access the actual prescription in the telematics infrastructure and dispense the medicine.
Gründerszene also showed in their report that the extensive catalogue of requirements offers potential for German start-ups in particular to develop their own solutions. Even if Gematik itself will also develop a corresponding application, the company can stand out from the crowd by offering additional functionalities and added value.
Thus, digitization has also arrived at something classic like the practical recipe and it shows that no industry is immune to digitization.
