Prescribers will soon be able to provide electronic prescriptions for controlled drugs as the government expands the coverage of the New Zealand e-Prescription service.

The New Zealand government has recently made amendments to the Misuse of Drugs Regulations 1997, which will allow prescribers to issue signature-exempt prescriptions for controlled drug medicines starting on 22 December.

The amendments to the regulations will also allow prescriptions for Class B controlled drug medicines to cover a period of up to three months when these are issued through the NZePS. 

WHY IT MATTERS

At present, prescribers and pharmacists have to provide a signed, hard copy of any prescription for a controlled drug medicine. Expanding the coverage of the NZePS to include such medications will then reduce the administrative burden for prescribers, the Health Ministry noted.

“No longer will prescriptions for controlled drugs have to be in hard copy with a physical signature. We will, finally, be able to say goodbye to fax machines," Health Minister Andrew Little said in an announcement about this move in August.

He added that for medications for some chronic conditions like ADHD, prescribers will be able to increase the period of time covered by a single e-script, reducing the number of times patients – especially those coming from rural areas – have to visit a GP for repeat prescriptions.

THE LARGER CONTEXT

The NZePS is an electronic HIE broker run by the Ministry of Health. It has an encrypted and secure channel for receiving prescriptions, which are then sent over to pharmacies for dispensing. Recent research has shown that the use of such an electronic medicines management system significantly reduces the harm caused by medication errors by eliminating illegible, ambiguous, or incomplete prescriptions and providing a single, comprehensive view of a patient's drug record. The government has worked with hospital IT providers, including Medtech, MyPractice, Indici and Medimap, to integrate NZePS with their systems to enable prescribers to issue e-scripts. 

At the start of the pandemic, the New Zealand government encouraged e-prescribing as a measure supporting the continuity of care amid strict measures to arrest growing COVID-19 infections. However, some GPs struggled to make this shift due to cost and technical barriers, a survey done last year found.