Remote Prescription During Pandemic: Challenges and Solutions

The current COVID-19 pandemic has created an awareness and at the same time provides an impetus to transform digitalisation of healthcare delivery. Remote prescription is one key component of telemedicine, but it is the easiest and already practised in most places during the current pandemic even without the framework of virtual medicine in place. However, remote prescription, with its antecedent problems cannot be properly and safely executed in isolation. To ensure patients' safety and health outcomes, specific guidelines will need to be developed to cater for specific medical conditions to address individual drug prescriptions and concerns. There is a need for a robust governance to ensure that patient's safety is the foremost priority, and provisions should be made for requirements of remote prescription in the different medical subspecialities. The pandemic provides an enormous opportunity for stakeholders and policymakers to come together to create a seamless and user friendly and yet innovative healthcare ecosystem to transform clinical healthcare delivery with patient safety as the core driver in the implementation.