Four countries of the European Union (EU) have already implemented the interoperable electronic prescription: Croatia, Estonia, Finland and Portugal. An important step for the digitization of the region.
The eHealth Digital Services Infrastructure (eHDSI) of the EU seeks to guarantee the attention of European citizens when they travel to countries of the union. This is part of the project My health @ EU, and seeks that European countries exchange health information in an interoperable way under two cross-border health services ePrescription and eDispensation, to obtain medicines in another EU country through an electronic prescription; Y patient summaries, containing important health information, such as allergies, current medication, previous illnesses, surgeries, among others.
Patient summaries is a collection of data that includes the electronic medical record and broader data. Furthermore, it eliminates language barriers by being available in all national languages of each EU country.
The eHDSI seeks that by 2025 these two services have been gradually implemented in 25 EU countries. Currently both the interoperable medical prescription and the patient summaries are working in Croatia, Estonia, Finland and Portugal and they hope that Spain will be the next country to adopt this innovation.
In other words, Portuguese citizens can travel to Finland, Croatia or Estonia and use the same digital medical prescription that they would present at a pharmacy in their country. The same happens with patient summaries, for example, in case of accidents, doctors could access the data of the foreign patient to make informed decisions.
“eHDSI facilitates the cross-border exchange of health data, including patient summaries and electronic prescriptions. Through the 'basic services', the European Commission is providing a common ICT infrastructure and transversal services (terminology, interoperability, etc.) to the EU countries”, explains the European Commission.
The secure exchange of health data is one of the most important objectives of this project, as it promotes not only the digitization of services but also connectivity within and outside European countries.
