Manoeuvre, from 2025 goodbye to paper prescriptions: they will only be electronic. What you need to know

After several extensions, the budget law stipulates that from 2025 all prescriptions must be in electronic format. But doctors and pharmacists have to come to terms with the reality of frequent technical malfunctions and solutions have to be found to still guarantee the service to patients.

The dematerialisation of drug prescriptions charged to the National Health Service is envisaged by Article 54 of the budget law, according to which 'all prescriptions charged to the National Health Service, to the territorial services for the health care of seafarers, maritime and civil aviation personnel (Sasn) and to citizens are made in electronic format'. The aim is to 'strengthen the monitoring of prescriptive appropriateness as well as to ensure the complete feeding of the electronic health record' and it will be the regions that will have to ensure the implementation of the rule.

"Electronic tools must be an aid for the doctor and for the quality of care as they improve the way prescriptions are transmitted to the pharmacy. The question is whether we are ready to do this and whether the support networks hold," notes the president of the Federation of the Order of Surgeons and Dentists (Fnomceo) Filippo Anelli. "We should avoid burdening the work of healthcare professionals by enhancing the electronic structure," he continues, referring to the more massive use that will be made of the network when, as the budget law envisages, all prescriptions will have to be dematerialised. There is also the issue of home care,' adds Anelli, 'because 'there are places in the country where electronic lines are not stable or not present at all'.

Similar is the position of the National Federation of Italian Pharmacy Owners (Federfarma), which had already reported the problem at the end of October and then at the beginning of November during repeated technical problems on the network. "Federfarma has always collaborated with the dematerialisation process since the experimental phase," says the federation's vice-president Gianni Petrosillo, who chairs Federfarma's rural pharmacy section. "Today, 98% of medicines are prescribed on dematerialised prescriptions, but the system works with criticalities," he adds, referring both to the main network along which dematerialised prescriptions travel, i.e. the Central Receiving System (Sac), and to the local networks, the Regional Receiving Systems (Sar). "The prescription code and the health card are keys with which the pharmacy can access the prescription," and in the event of problems at Sac or Sar, "it is not possible to trace the type of drug to be dispensed," notes the Federfarma vice-president.

'If there was some kind of reminder with the name of the drug, it would be possible to dispense it provisionally and then, with the connection restored, go and close the prescription,' he notes. This is something that Federfarma has already reported to the Ministry of Health. 'It is a problem that needs to be addressed because,' he concludes, 'it is about respecting the citizen's right to have the medicine.