ArmInfo.Armenia can introduce the practice of providing electronic prescriptions for medicines in parallel with traditional ones - paper ones. Healthcare Minister Arsen Torosyan announced this to journalists on January 23 at a press conference.
According to Torosyan, the Ministry of Healthcare faced a dilemma in this matter. "On the one hand, everyone believes that it is necessary and that the choice of a number of drugs should not be left to the patient's discretion; on the other hand, there is a bad example and failure in trying to introduce prescription drugs. Therefore, we don't want to resort to declarative statements which we cannot realize later ", "said Torosyan. Among the reasons for the problematic implementation of the system, as the minister pointed out, the lack of control functions for prescription and sale of prescription drugs at the moment. To implement a smoother transition to the new system, the Ministry of Healthcare plans to introduce an electronic recipe system that will operate in parallel with the traditional ones - paper ones. "We have postponed the introduction of the system for a while in order to understand how the system works and what procedural changes need to be made," Torosyan said. Today we know that the recipe form will be changed, in particular, the fields for filling will be reduced. Thus, the Ministry of Health is not sure that the system will be fully implemented from June 1, 2019, as planned.
To recall, from March 1, 2018, a new procedure for dispensing medicines entered into force in Armenia. It was reported that at the first stage, the new rules will affect antibiotics, hormonal and codeine-containing drugs, from July 1 - injectable and anticancer drugs, and from October 1 - all other drugs included in the prescription list of the Ministry of Healthcare of Armenia. The Ministry of Healthcare stated that by the end of 2018, out of 4,723 drugs registered in Armenia, 3,632 would be sold exclusively by prescription, including antibiotics.