Earlier this year, there has been a change regarding how one gets prescription medication in Germany. Back then, one gets a pink sheet of paper from one's doctor, which one then carries to the pharmacy. The pharmacy fills the prescription and takes the paper away from you. Now, starting earlier this year, the paper has vanished, and everything is now digital. Well, sort of. There's a few hiccups, at least, when I experienced it.
See, everyone (or almost everyone) has health insurance. And this comes with a card that has a chip in it. Every time I go to the doctor, I have to show this card to my doctor so that it is scanned, and that way they can see that I have a valid health insurance. Starting this year, the health insurance system implemented a digital way of giving out prescriptions. Now there is a digital system that shows pharmacies whether there is a prescription medication that is allocated to patients, and all the patient needs to do is to give the pharmacies the insurance card so that they can scan it. I tried this the first time a few months ago, but unfortunately, it didn't work out as expected.
I was with my doctor, who needed to issue me a new prescription for some regular medication I am taking. I gave my card, they scanned it, and then I was told that my prescription was already in the system. Then I went to the pharmacy, who told me that they unfortunately couldn't see the prescription. Maybe it was delayed, and there was some processing time involved?
So I went later in the day to a different pharmacy. Still I was unsuccessful. And then a third try, also a failure. In the end, I had to go back to my doctor to double check, and apparently there was another missing step. So they pressed that button. And after that, I went back to the first pharmacy I went to, and voila, it finally worked.
I love digitalisation, don't get me wrong. But I have to say, the user experience of this one wasn't the greatest. Hopefully this is just teething issues and eventually it'll be smoother than this. At least it was a good thing that I didn't need the medication urgently.
