ELECTRONIC PRESCRIPTION SERVICES SYSTEM IN GREECE - PILOT STUDY

摘要

The aim of the work is to provide an overview of Electronic Prescription Services in Greece, to illustrate a detailed description of the Greek Electronic Prescription Services system, to evaluate how it has changed, the way public healthcare system works, to analyze major benefits and potential problems faced. The self reported questionnaire was distributed to the three main stakeholders in the medication prescnption process: doctors, patients and pharmacists. The collected results have been processed in a spreadsheet application. The results have been analyzed individually but also in comparison with relevant results from each group of people. It has been identified that the major aspects of interest are the ease of use of the new system, the safety that the new system introduces regarding medication and dispensing errors, the level of service that the patient receives, the administrative and back-office workload and how it is managed, the economical aspect as far as the public expenditure is concemed but also the costs for the professionals themselves and finally, the technological aspect and how it affects the users. The new system has been able to overall improve the process of drug prescribing from the safety perspective (less medication errors), level of service (more interpersonal communication and less administrative overload with the patient), economical aspect (mainly as far as the public expenditure is concerned) and back office administration. As any other new system, it has been also identified that most users struggle to familiarize, spend more time especially at the beginning while trying to learn how to use it. There is room for improvement for the system itself but mainly for the organized, well-structured and extensive training of the users in this continuously changing and dynamic environment that healthcare is.