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Within a month, over 6 million electronic prescriptions have been validated through the real-time control system during the prescribing and dispensing of medications paid by the National Health Insurance Fund (NHIF). Since the beginning of June 2025, when the new process was launched, more than 9 million validation requests have been submitted by doctors and pharmacists to verify the correct issuance of prescriptions. The average processing time for a single request is under one second and does not affect the time required to fulfill a prescription. The system is fully integrated and synchronized with the National Health Information System (NHIS).
“The new real-time process for prescribing and dispensing medications provides maximum protection of the rights of insured individuals and increases control over the spending of public funds,” stated Georgi Nedev, Head of Health Insurance Systems at Information Services. According to him, the system significantly saves time and costs for patients, doctors, and pharmacists alike.
Data shows that within one month the new system registered nearly 73,000 incorrect prescriptions by doctors during the preliminary control phase and over 33,000 errors during the final control phase. This is a significant relief for over 28,000 patients who avoided unnecessary trips between doctors and pharmacies due to incorrectly issued prescriptions. According to Nedev, with the introduction of real-time control, there is a positive trend towards a reduction in incorrectly written prescriptions for medicines. The most common mistakes made by doctors include duplicate prescriptions, prescribing medications not listed in the patient’s prescription booklet or for inactive diagnoses, and prescribing quantities that are not multiples of the packaging size. Among pharmacies, the most frequent errors include duplicate serial number/product code combinations in the NHIS, missing NHIF prescription numbers in the NHIS, and others.
The new process significantly assists doctors by providing real-time confirmation that a prescription has been correctly issued or by listing the errors that need to be corrected. Validation is performed during the standard actions they perform with their medical software and does not prolong the prescription time. If an error is detected, the prescription is marked as incorrect and cannot be filled. This saves patients the trouble of going to the pharmacy and back to the doctor for a new prescription.
Real-time validation is also extremely useful for pharmacists, who no longer have to wait until the end of the reporting period to find out whether they will receive payment from the NHIF for the medicines dispensed. The National Health Insurance Fund validates the payment for the medicines in real time, and pharmacies can be sure that they will receive payment.