Filenews 17 April 2024
The Health Insurance Organization takes its medicines from the warehouses of the Ministry of Health, proceeds to the gradual abolition of paper prescriptions for specialized treatments and puts an end to the suffering of chronic patients in state pharmacies.
To date, patients who receive specialized treatments (which have already joined the GHS) are obliged to go to state pharmacies to obtain them, which constitutes a huge and unnecessary inconvenience.
This process has caused many times in the past strong disagreements between the private hospitals of the GHS, the HIO and the Ministry of Health, since it creates two important problems.
First, patients are stranded in queues at state pharmacies. Secondly, due to the fact that these medicines, although included in the GHS, are delivered to patients outside the GHS procedures, through the warehouses of the Ministry of Health, which supply state pharmacies, it is not possible to issue prescriptions through the system's software.
As a result, doctors were forced to give their patients traditional paper prescriptions, which causes even more inconvenience since patients have to visit their doctors' offices to get the prescription they need and it is not possible to issue it electronically.
As everything shows, however, this problem is now being solved as the HIO, with the announcement of new offers for the securing of these specialized treatments (in cooperation with the Purchasing and Procurement Directorate of the Ministry of Health), has included in the specifications of the relevant tenders a provision regarding the storage of stocks and their distribution to all GHS hospitals by the importing company.
In this way, according to the official information provided last week by the HIO, "the order and payment of these pharmaceutical products to meet the needs of hospitals (including the day care treatments of the beneficiary collaborating specialists) will be made by the hospital pharmacies themselves / pharmacists directly to importers (CIS / representatives / pharmaceutical wholesalers) and the compensation will be made by the Health Insurance Organization to the hospital".
Currently, the HIO has signed contracts, based on the new offers, with a number of companies. For those formulations that have signed new contracts, the old procedure is terminated and the new one is implemented.
In this way, gradually, with the change of contracts, all formulations will be included in the new process.
It is noted that the new procedure does not concern specialized treatments that patients receive through the Nominal Requests Committee of the Ministry of Health. The change in these formulations will also take place gradually and will be proportional to the process of integrating treatments into the GHS. That is, for each formulation that the HIO completes all procedures and joins, based on an agreement with the supplier, the new data will apply.
In this way, the number of medicines currently stored in the warehouses of the Ministry of Health (which were flooded a month ago due to severe weather events) will gradually decrease.
