In Veneto, electronic prescriptions go haywire: patients are left without medicines
More problems in Veneto due to the blocking of the electronic prescription system: doctors fill them out, but they get lost in the system and it is impossible to trace the prescribed medicines. With the result that people are forced to leave the pharmacies empty-handed
VENICE – If Sparta cries, Athens doesn’t laugh, the adage goes. And so if the general practitioners of Veneto are furious and full of problems, things are no better for the pharmacists. The problem is the same for both: the blocking of the system for electronic prescriptions. The paper ones are made that patients have to go and collect by hand; and the digital ones get lost on the web, with the result that patients cannot collect their medicines. Federfarma speaks of “two days of passion in the pharmacies of Veneto, with patients queuing to collect the medicines prescribed by the general practitioners but forced to leave empty-handed. Because the electronic prescriptions entered by the doctors in the IT platform do not arrive at their destination or get lost along the way making it impossible to trace the prescribed medicines“. Yesterday and today “were days of great criticality for the pharmacies of Veneto on the front of the dispensing of the drug, dozens of phone calls arrived to Federfarma Veneto from colleagues forced to throw up their hands in front of the requests of the citizens to collect the drugs at the counter”.
THE PROBLEM HAS BEEN CONTINUING SINCE 12 OCTOBER
The problem, highlighted also by the Federation of General Practitioners (Fimmg) of Veneto, “is structural and has been ongoing since last October 12 even if, in the last two days, the Electronic Prescription Reception System has went literally blocked. The inconvenience – a real disservice for the citizen – affects patients first and foremost, but pharmacists are also victims of the situation: without a prescription on the platform they cannot dispense the requested medicine”, Federfarma protests.
“For two days, faced with people queuing up convinced they are picking up their medicines at the counter, we must apologize for a disservice that does not depend on us. We do not know whether the cause of the problem is due to the regional or national reception system, what we have certainly found in the field for almost two weeks is a structural disservice that is also quite frequent – underlines Andrea Bellon, president of Federfarma Veneto which represents about 1,200 pharmacies in the region – pharmacies are the first dispensers of the drug, the first health facility on the territory as well as the first interlocutor for the citizen looking for help or advice. Butthese technical problems do not allow us to guarantee the service to which citizens are entitled“.
Patients are literally starting to ‘wander’ back and forth from pharmaciesto see if the platform has uploaded electronic prescriptions. Trusting that the technical problems will be resolved as soon as possible, Federfarma Veneto proposes a solution. “It has also often happened that the dematerialized prescription uploaded by the doctor with the system functioning was not then consultable by the pharmacist because, in the meantime, the system had crashed. And this fall can also cause the loss of the prescription without the possibility of recovery” and then, here is the proposal, doctors could go back to physically printing prescriptions (as they do, according to the Fimmg) or go back to using the red prescription pad. “We realize that this represents a step backwards compared to digitalization and implies a return to the physical meeting in the clinic between patient and doctor. But, in the face of similar technical problems, in our opinion it is the only solution”, concludes Federfarma.