The updated guidelines have been published for the adaptation of the IT procedures of the electronic prescription, following the obligation to indicate the active ingredient in the prescription of the National Health Service. However, family doctors, pharmacists and pharmaceutical companies have expressed the need to urgently review the document, through a letter sent to the Ministry of Health. The Guidelines provide indications for adapting the IT systems of doctors, pharmacies and Regions to the rules established by the spending review on prescription by active ingredient, but Fimmg, Federfarma and Farmindustria detect anomalies. «The findings are different for the three categories – explained the national secretary of Federfarma Alfonso Misasi – however they more or less refer to the same discourse, which in these guidelines has not taken into account the legislation in force". These are above all technical issues: «as far as we pharmacists are concerned, we are forced to visually detect the non-substitutability of the prescription and not with optical detection systems and this creates problems in the elaboration of the recipes. As far as Farmindustria is concerned, there is a request for a wording not envisaged by the law on generics. Then there is a problem that mainly concerns the doctor and that is not only technical ». This was confirmed by the national secretary of the Italian federation of general practitioners James Milillo, to Fimmg Notizie: "the text needs to be reviewed, the regulation in fact also provides for the repetition of a prescription for a chronic therapy, if indicated by the doctor, the non-replaceability, an annotation not provided for by law and this represents a useless bureaucratic complication . Furthermore, the regulation does not provide for any revision of the coding necessary to identify with certainty the pharmaceutical forms prescribed with the active ingredient alone: this would make it impossible to dematerialize the prescriptions". But doctors and pharmacists also raise a question of method. "We had already asked to be present at the table, - complains Misasi - there were orders from doctors and pharmacists who, however, are assigned to different problems rather than the practical management of the work: in the end something came out that was scarcely applicable".
March 27, 2013 – DoctorNews33
