30/09-05   -   Press releases

Electronic Health Card: Pharmacy Software Ready for ePrescription

Walldorf/Mannheim, September 29, 2005 – ADG is the first producer of pharmacy software to connect its merchandise management systems to the health card solution from InterComponentWare AG (ICW). As a result, this provider of Windows-based pharmacy systems, which leads the market with its 4,500 customers, is now able to use the mandatory applications ePrescription and Contract Data Management, as well as the main voluntary applications, in model and test regions.

“Together with our partners ICW and AvP, we have now mapped the entire life cycle of an ePrescription", reports ADG marketing manager Anita Hartmeyer. “That ranges from issuing the prescription by the physician, viewing it at the patient kiosk, reading the ePrescription in at the cash register, and then forwarding the prescription data to ICW’s personal health record LifeSensor and to AvP’s electronic billing system." In the process, the pharmacy software from ADG also checks for drug interactions and contraindications with respect to medications prescribed earlier or patient-individual risks such as allergies, diagnostic findings, age, and sex (CAVE-Check). This check is performed on the basis of the data available in both the ADG-system and the personal health record LifeSensor.

Connecting an existing ADG system to the infrastructure of the health card requires only the installation of a Medical NTBA and a software update. The Medical NTBA is the ICW implementation of the bIT4health connector, which provides secure access to the national health care IT infrastructure. The software update installs an interface between the existing system and the Medical NTBA, which handles further communications with the IT infrastructure.

The ADG merchandise management systems are linked to the ICW personal health card solution by using the so-called Software Development Kit (SDK). The SDK gives developers at software companies a uniform interface that they can use to access the Medical NTBA in their familiar programming language. Silvano Genthner, head of software development at ADG: “With the SDK, we were able to connect all our pharmacy merchandise management systems to the national health care IT infrastructure of the electronic health card within just a few days without any problem." ICW provides the Software Development Kit to all interested manufacturers of primary systems at no charge and also offers regular training in its use.

With support of ADG, ICW is demonstrating a complete scenario for electronic prescriptions at its stand in Hall 17 at MEDICA 2005.