The Health Insurance Organisation is now sourcing its medicines from the Ministry of Health warehouses, gradually phasing out paper prescriptions for specialised treatments and putting an end to the inconvenience faced by chronic patients at state pharmacies.
Until now, patients receiving specialised treatments (already included in the General Health System) were required to visit state pharmacies to obtain them, causing significant and unnecessary inconvenience.
This process has often led to disputes between private hospitals under the General Health System (GHS), the Health Insurance Organisation (HIO), and the Ministry of Health, as it creates two major problems.
Firstly, patients endure long queues at state pharmacies.
Secondly, due to the fact that these medicines, although part of the GHS, are delivered to patients outside of the GHS procedures through the Ministry of Health warehouses, it is not possible to issue prescriptions electronically.
As a result, doctors were forced to give their patients traditional paper prescriptions, which poses an even greater inconvenience as patients must visit their doctors’ offices to obtain the prescription they need, and it cannot be issued electronically.
However, it seems this problem is now being resolved as the HIO, through new tenders for securing these specialised treatments (in collaboration with the Ministry of Health’s Directorate of Procurement), has incorporated provisions for the storage and distribution of these supplies to all GHS hospitals by the importing company.
In this way, according to the official announcement made by the HIO last week, “the ordering and payment of these pharmaceutical products to meet the needs of hospitals (including the daily care treatments of eligible collaborating specialist doctors) will be made directly by the hospital pharmacies/pharmacists to the importers (CSK/representatives/pharmacy warehouses), and reimbursement will be made by the Health Insurance Organisation to the hospital.”
At present, the HIO has entered into contracts with several companies based on the new tenders. For the medicines covered by these new contracts, the old process is terminated, and the new one is implemented.
In this gradual manner, as contracts change, all medicines will be incorporated into the new process.
It should be noted that the new process does not concern the specialised treatments that patients receive through the Ministry of Health’s Name Request Committee.
The change for these medicines will also be gradual and will correspond to the process of integrating the treatments into the GHS.
That is, for each medicine that the HIO completes all procedures for and integrates, based on an agreement with the supplier, the new procedures will be applied within the GHS.
In this way, the number of medicines currently stored in the Ministry of Health’s warehouses (which as known, were flooded a month ago due to severe weather conditions) will gradually decrease.
