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All physicians who are members of the Bulgarian Medical Union (BMU) can now issue electronic white prescriptions from a smartphone or tablet. This became possible after, by request of the Ministry of Health, Information Services developed and launched the eRx mobile application. It was presented by the acting Minister of e-Government Georgi Todorov and the acting Minister of Healthcare, Asen Medzhidiev, MD.
"All our efforts are aimed at maximum relief for the patient, to save his time and walking around the institutions," said the Minister of e-Government, Georgi Todorov. According to him, with the launch of the eRx mobile application, general practitioners will also be greatly relieved.
"Through the mobile application, the physician can issue an electronic prescription at any time and from any place," said the Minister of Health Asen Medidzhiev. He explained that the written prescription immediately enters the patient's electronic health record and can be executed by any pharmacy. According to the Minister, when the mobile application is put into operation, all paper prescriptions will be phased out, which will increase control over the expenditure of funds for medicines.
"Before it was officially launched, the eRx mobile application was tested with physicians who are members of the BMU, who provided their feedback in order to improve its functionalities," explained Ivaylo Stoychev, project manager in Information Services.
The purpose of the application is to make it easier for physicians to issue electronic prescriptions, in cases where they do not have access to a computer with medical software. Through eRx, e-prescriptions that meet the requirements of the National Health Information System (NHIS) can be issued for home visits and other emergency situations.
For the convenience of medical professionals, much of the information in the e-prescription written through the mobile application is pre-entered or selected from lists. Prescription of medications is done through a dynamic search for a trade name in a preloaded list of all officially registered medications in Bulgaria. The physician has the opportunity to enter instructions for taking the prescribed medications - frequency, sequence, quantity, form, method, time, etc. Entering data about the patient is also maximally simplified, and part of the information is extracted from the entered Personal ID Number, and the selection of citizenship and address of residence is made from a drop-down menu. The application also allows writing, in free text, of non-medicinal products such as consumables, medical foods and nutritional supplements.
The eRx mobile app can be downloaded for free from the App Store or Google Play on any mobile device the physician uses. For mobile devices with an iOS operating system, a minimum version of the operating system 14 is required, and for devices with Android operating system, the minimum version must be 9. Adding a mobile device is done by logging in with a Qualified Electronic Signature (KEP) at doc.his.bg. The pairing of the mobile device with the physician’s profile is done by scanning a QR code, from which the name, Unified Identification Number and specialty/s of the physician are extracted.
In addition to the qualified electronic signature, the security of the information in the eRx mobile application is also guaranteed with additional biometric protection that the physician can activate. The app can be deactivated and re-added after re-pairing the mobile device.
The electronic prescription issued through eRx is recorded in NHIS and becomes part of the electronic patient file. For more convenience, the National Reference Number (NRN) of the issued e-prescription can be shared with the patient via SMS or other short messaging application.
Until now, over 28 million electronic prescriptions have been written through the National Health Information System, 25 thousand of which are "white" prescriptions.