All social insurance funds, including branches of the Social Insurance Foundation (Ika), will be hooked up to the electronic prescription system by May 1 this year, the Labour and Social Insurance ministry announced during a press conference on Wednesday.
The press conference was held to present a cooperation memorandum between the ministry and the National Bank of Greece for a 1.5 million euro donation from the bank in order to develop the Electronic Prescription System.
The system is also scheduled to be extended to all branches of the National Health System and all providers of medical services and pharmaceuticals by the year 2017.
Participating in the press conference were Labour Minister Louka Katseli, Alternate Labour Minister Yiorgos Koutroumanis, NBG governor Apostolos Tamvakakis and Social Insurance General Secretary Athina Dretta.
Katseli stressed that the new system would be a major reform allowing effective control and rationalisation of spending and transparency of agencies in the social insurance system, ensuring its viability and the provision of decent pensions.
She stressed that the working of the social insurance system until now had been "an example of mismanagement, lawlessness and deviation".
The minister pointed out that the pilot phase of the programme as implemented in the OAEE fund for the self-employed had resulted in a 45 percent reduction in pharmaceutical spending compared to the same period in the previous year, reducing the average cost of a prescription from 80 euro to 48 euro and the total number of prescriptions from 950,000 to 620,000 in the October-December period of 2010.
The extension of the system to all social insurance funds from May 1 is expected to yield savings of around 1.4 billion euro during the year 2011, Katseli announced and thanked the NBG for its support.
Koutroumanis said the system was expected to bring benefits on many levels - including that of excessive use of medicine that was harmful to health. He predicted a better service for the general public, with improved access to necessary medication, and forecast that annual spending on drugs will have been reduced from 10.6 billion euro to seven billion euro by the year 2012.
source: ANA
