Good tech, fast medicine: how you'll soon be able to pick up a prescription anywhere in Europe

The development of so-called ePrescriptions will soon make it possible for people to be able to pick up their medication at any pharmacy inside the EU without a paper prescription. The multi-lingual system is already being used in Finland and Estonia. Smart Health travelled to Tallinn to find out more.

Estonia and Finland are connected in many ways. Just in terms of cross-border travel, millions of people make the journey between Helsinki and Tallinn every year. But the two EU nation’s ties go much deeper than that. Now both Estonians and Finns can pick up their prescribed medicine from a pharmacy, irrespective of which country they are in.

That’s been made possible, thanks to an e-Prescription and e-Dispensation service set up in 2019. Entering a patient's electronic identity card, the pharmacist uses the ePrescription platform to check and then hand over the prescription.

"Once we are in the system, we see the list of the prescriptions made for this person, and the system automatically translates it to the Estonian language. So everything is understandable for us," explains Pharmacist Aleksandr Vares.

Aleksandr says once the prescription has been paid for, it takes a few minutes for the system to send the information to the patient's home country. After that the prescription is either reimbursed immediately or the cost of the prescribed medicine is reduced. 

"It's possible to buy almost all prescription medicines, except psychotropic, narcotic medicines and extemporaneous medicines, which are prepared in the pharmacy," Aleksandr adds. 

Estonia’s public IT agency Tehik developed the e-Prescription system. Its own experience has been used to help the European Commission to launch the European Health Data Space. A project