Pharmacy current problems in Estonia

We start to collect and publish real problems from the healthcare domain from all over the world and propose our solutions to it. We hope this will give our readers more clear view of a healthcare domain issues and possible solutions. We will start our short real story publishing cycle with interview of one of our senior advisers, Irina Kljukas.

Our adviser, Irina Kljukas, pharmacy professional with more than 10 years of experience has collected main problems that occur in a daily pharmacy practice. She worked in different drug stores in 2 biggest Estonian cities such as Tallinn and Tartu. Her daily responsibilities consulting patients, selling and ordering drugs, choosing the best suitable medication providers as she worked as a drug seller and head of the drug store in different times. In this short story we provide a structured summary of the daily pharmacy problems and propose the real use case of the SmartHealthcareToday system.

According to Irina’s interview there are 3 main problems in Estonian healthcare system that lead to the situation when patient cannot get appropriate medication or can get a wrong one. These are insufficient doctor’s interest in the pharmacys’ supplies, lack of communication between drug stores and doctors, poor synchronization of medicine related data between the State Agency of Medicines and hospitals.

In Estonia there are different organizations involved in the medicine prescription process. These are healthcare providers, the State Agency of Medicines, medicine providers, pharmacy drugstores, Estonian Health Insurance Fund, Estonian Health Information System. In this cross-organizational process errors can occur in any stage of cooperation. Most of such errors occur because of lack of real time information and distrust.

In the next publications we will look at each problem in details and propose our solution to it. To be continued.