The USR announced on Saturday that it has initiated a legislative project through which it wants to create a single platform for medical prescriptions that will also include drug stocks in pharmacies.

“The EDR project obliges the Ministry of Health to create a platform through which family doctors will be able to issue electronic prescriptions and where patients will be able to see drug stocks in pharmacies in real time. Practically, the initiative solves what does not work in the current legislative framework,” said a press release sent to USR on Saturday and quoted by Agerpres.

The bill was conceived and written by Deputy Alin Apostol, a software engineer by profession, and Deputy Adrian Wiener, a doctor, the cited source reports.

“It is absolutely disgusting that in 2024 in Romania, doctors write prescriptions by hand on pieces of paper. Then the patient takes a piece of paper and on the way to the pharmacy tries to understand what he should take from there. I saw that in Poland it’s very easy to get a prescription from a family doctor, they either give you a QR code or a PDF, it goes to your phone very quickly, it’s 100% digital and you save it on your phone if you want , not in the paper drawer at home. We proposed something similar for Romania,” USR MP Alin Apostol said, quoted in the press release.

The project involves issuing electronic prescriptions through a unique medical prescription platform, a platform integrated with both the Patient Electronic Record (DES) and the Single Integrated Information System (SIUI). The Ministry of Health must create this platform, and doctors are obliged to use it gradually, within three months from the moment of its implementation, the message says.

According to the UDR, the project also provides that patients can view drug stocks in real time, also through the platform.

“In today’s Romania, to be able to buy all prescription drugs, a patient has to visit two or three pharmacies. He cannot know what are the stocks of certain drugs in the pharmacy. And so it happens that the pharmacist takes the prescription and says: we only have X and Y here. And then the patient is forced to go to another pharmacy to look for the medicine that was prescribed for him. This is not normal, a patient should be able to quickly find a pharmacy online that can provide him with all the drugs prescribed by the doctor,” says USR deputy Adrian Wiener, also quoted in the statement.

Although e-prescribing legislation has been in place in Romania since 2012, the system developed at the time does not work and cannot be used on a large scale, USR officials say.

“The IT solutions that were used then are completely obsolete today. That is why there is a need to rethink the IT solution and to force the government to get involved in these reforms to make the medical experience easier for patients in Romania,” the political formation also shows.