Approaches for certification of electronic prescription software.

The proper management of drug treatment is essential, since adverse drug reactions are common reasons of hospitalisations. Expenditure on drug therapy has also been growing faster than any other aspect of health care in many countries. Savings and quality improvements in drug treatment could be achieved with computerised prescribing. In this paper, the architecture of an electronic prescription system is described in the light of software certification and registration. An electronic prescription system is an example of a system supporting shared care and therefore it should be person based, integrated, secure and confidential and data should be shared among health care institutions. The system architecture shares the idea of a virtual patient record and a smart card will be used as a key to prescription data located on the network. The certification and registration of medical software is a difficult and costly procedure. Ensuring the quality of software can be based on; certification of development process, voluntary evaluation, and post-market surveillance. Voluntary evaluation practice would be a precious tool for both the customers and software developers, and it would also be an invaluable source of information in terms of developing new software.