The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the delivery of essential health services, especially regarding preventing and
managing noncommunicable diseases (1) and has also exposed pre-existing vulnerabilities in the national health system.
The pandemic found Greece with an extremely stretched health system, after a long-term economic crisis and with primary
health care, despite the continuous reform attempts since 2014, still fragmented, understaffed and underfunded (2). Less
than 20% of the population was enrolled in a family doctor’s list.
There were deep concerns that primary health care in Greece not only could not meet the need to act as an essential
foundation of the response to the pandemic but could also have collapsed, resulting in many people living with chronic
diseases no longer receiving appropriate treatment or access to medicines (1).
Adaptive and innovative approaches were necessary to protect and promote essential health service delivery in response to
the pandemic and in the recovery phase (3). The pandemic signalled a turn in Greece’s health system towards digitalization
and acted as a catalyst to tackle longstanding obstacles in implementing many digital health tools. Introducing a paperless
electronic prescription (ePrescription) system that did not require the patient’s physical presence proved to be a gamechanger that enabled primary care services to respond effectively to the extremely challenging circumstances and also
triggered further digitalization of the health system (4).
Greece: Introducing paperless, remote ePRESCRIPTION— A game-changer for primary care services (2021)
