For several hours on Monday, e-prescriptions were unavailable due to an IT failure. Thomas Preis, President of the Federation of German Pharmacists’ Associations (ABDA), informed the “Rheinische Post” (Wednesday) that the failure affected patients from all health insurance funds equally. The disruption occurred from approximately 12:45 PM on September 7 until 7:40 AM on September 8.
According to Preis, doctors’ practices were unable to issue electronic prescriptions (e-prescriptions) or sick notes (eAU), while pharmacies could not retrieve e-prescriptions. He stated that initial information suggests the fault is linked to the infrastructure of D-Trust, a provider for the Federal Printing Office.
The president of the pharmacy associations is urging that digital systems become more resilient. He stressed that it is critical for essential digital healthcare applications to function reliably even during technical problems, ensuring that outages have minimal impact on patient care. Consequently, he expects the robustness and fail-safes of the telematics infrastructure to be consistently strengthened. Prices emphasized that technical structures need to be made more robust and critical dependencies reduced, adding that digital healthcare applications must be reliably usable at all times for patients.
