Adonis Georgiades: We have identified more than 100 different doctors with over-prescribing [vid,pics]

"Ζero tolerance for over-prescribing"

Health Minister Adonis Georgiadis on Wednesday presented the first data emerging after the measures imposed by the health ministry to stop the over-prescribing of medicines.

Georgiadis spoke of “zero tolerance for over-prescribing” as a commitment to protect public health, adding: “Let us stop the waste so that we can use the resources given to us by the public to ensure that patients are not short of the innovative treatments they need.”

As he stated, this is “wasteful over-prescribing and ultimately theft. This money is not missed by the minister, it is missed by the citizens who are at risk of not having the medicines they need.”

“I regret that there are doctors who, for their own benefit, overprescribe,” the health minister said, while noting that this did not apply to all doctors.

The Health Ministry recently revealed that a doctor was fined 800,000 euros for prescribing thousands of medications over the course of a month using his mother’s Social Security number. Just before a press conference on measures to tackle over-prescribing, Adonis Georgiades discussed efforts to reduce rising pharmaceutical costs through existing and new systems developed by EDIKA.

Georgiades explained that “we are conducting audits through EDIKA and EOPYY, we have already sent apology notes and have sent the cases to the financial prosecutor because there will be criminal sanctions.”

In this context, the Minister of Health announced that “the audit will be done retroactively and backward” adding that “according to estimates, there are at least 50 million euros more drugs that are written every year to EOPYY without having to be written.”