Pharmacy current problems in Estonia part 2

We continue with publications describing pharmacy problems in Estonia. In this article we consider main problems in more details.

During the patient’s visit in the hospital doctor focuses on the diagnosis definition based on the patient’s anamnesis and test results. After defining diagnosis doctor prescribes medication prescription that can be either medication or active ingredient based. Patient then comes to the drug store and finds out that there is no such a medication on sale neither in this specific drug store or any other in his hometown. There are different reasons why medication may not be present in the drug store. First, old party can be already sold out and new party is still on the way. Another reason can be that there are logistics problems on the pharmacy factory and medication even cannot be ordered by a drug store. In this case pharmacist tries to find a substitution for the patient by searching for missing medication analog. Without knowing important aspects of patient’s health such as allergies and individual intolerance pharmacist can easily do a mistake and sell wrong medication to patient. Doctors are not checking medication’s presence every time they prescribe it.

When lead manager of a drug store plans for medicine supplies for the next month he or she focuses on the previous sale results and not on the possible real needs of patients. At the same time when order is calculated and sent to medicine provider company this information is not shared with healthcare providers such as hospitals. In this case, when doctor prescribes medicines he cannot prognose if there will be enough medicines for all patients who need it at the same time.

Often, the State Agency of Medicines does not provide real time information about medicine availability on the pharmacy market in Estonia. The provided information can be outdated and contain misleading information. Doctors in the hospitals trust in the information provided on the official web page of the State Agency of Medicines. At the same time doctor can prescribe a medication without checking the important availability details from the State Agency of Medicines web page.

In the next part we will describe how SmartHealthCareToday helpsto solve these problems. To be continued…