The Health Insurance Fund will now send people automatic notifications about new prescriptions. Every time a doctor writes a new valid prescription, a notification will be sent to the person's designated email address, and all notifications will also be stored in the national mailbox.

"Notifications are important, for example, in situations where a person needs medication urgently, has consulted a doctor, and needs to make sure that the prescription has been issued before going to the pharmacy. People no longer have to visit the state or health portal to check whether the doctor has already written a prescription for them. On the other hand, doctors do not have to respond to people's letters or calls asking whether the medication can already be purchased from the pharmacy," said Evgeni Nikolaevski, product manager of the health portal.

On average, nearly one-fifth of prescriptions written in Estonia remain unfilled. For example, in 2023, doctors wrote a total of nearly 15 million prescriptions, but just over 12 million of them were filled. According to Nikolaevski, notifications also play an important role here in reminding people that their medication is waiting for them at the pharmacy and that the doctor did not waste their time when writing the prescription.

The State Information System Authority (RIA), which provides both the eesti.ee and national mailbox services, welcomes the solution that brings prescription notifications to people. "We are actively collecting user feedback to further improve the service. This notification has been a long-awaited solution for people and is an important addition to the state's digital services portfolio, making it more convenient for people to obtain medicines. In the future, we plan to make receiving notifications even more convenient by bringing them to the mobile app as push notifications so that people can receive notifications immediately on their phones," said Õie-Mari Aasmäe, Head of Technology Development at RIA.

Notifications are sent for prescriptions that have not yet been purchased, reserved, or canceled. If one doctor has written several prescriptions, they are grouped into one notification. However, prescriptions written by different doctors are sent as separate notifications.

Other notifications, such as invitations to participate in screening tests, are also sent via the national mailbox. To ensure that notifications reach you, please check your contact details on the state or health portal and, if necessary, forward letters arriving in your national mailbox to your personal e-mail address. Notifications can also be forwarded to multiple addresses.

"It may happen that the recipient of a prescription has previously forwarded their notifications to the e-mail address of a family member or relative, for example. As a result, the notification may end up in the wrong person's mailbox. To avoid this, each person can specify the e-mail address to which notifications sent by the state will be forwarded. This can be set up both on the health portal and on the eesti.ee website," explained Nikolaevski.

If a person has not forwarded their national mailbox, a link will be displayed on the home page of the health portal, or desktop, through which the person can make the appropriate settings.

The configured e-mail address can be checked and, if necessary, changed in two ways:

• On the health portal, on the left side of the page, under "My settings" and "Forwarding notifications – add e-mail"
• On the state portal eesti.ee, under "Mailbox" and "Contact details"

It is also worth checking whether the phone number used by the person is listed on the state portal. This is important so that the person receives reminders when it is their turn to participate in a screening or when their child is due for a health check-up.

The prescription notification feature was developed in cooperation with the Health and Welfare Information Systems Center (TEHIK).