Shop Apotheke, headquartered in Venlo, the Netherlands, received its first electronic prescription on October 28. In addition, further e-prescriptions have been received since then, which could be processed further without any problems, as the online retailer reports. Paper printouts, however, can still be used and submitted by mail. In the age of digitalization, however, there is unlikely to be a lack of acceptance by customers, believes Chief Commercial Officer, Stephan Weber, who also co-founded Shop Apotheke. It took two years to prepare for the e-regulation.
The nationwide roll-out of the e-prescription is now still scheduled for December 1 of this year, because the test phase in the Berlin-Brandenburg test region was initially slow, so that not enough electronic prescriptions could be tested. Originally, the nationwide launch and rollout was planned earlier, but too few doctors‘ offices have been able to generate the digital prescription so far. In the meantime, however, e-prescriptions from the Berlin-Brandenburg region have reached other online pharmacies, it adds.
The business figures of Shop Apotheke were also recently published. Accordingly, the Dutch mail-order pharmacy increased its sales by 9.8 percent to 772 million euros. The forecast was for a ten to 15 percent increase in sales.
Source: www.pharmazeutische-zeitung.de