A rather peculiar tender was issued by the Australian Department of Health back in September 2021 for a review of the electronic prescribing ecosystem, with particular emphasis on the funding model. The tender was full of the usual government verbiage, talking about the need to look at “opportunities to improve the customer experience for prescribers, patients and dispensers; optimise the environment to support further scale; and to ensure the effectiveness and sustainability of the operating and funding model”. In other words, it wanted to look at cutting costs.

We hear that one of the usual suspects in the big four consulting groups won the contract to take at look at this ecosystem, saw that the department was not only funding every eScript token that a GP sent out by SMS but that it had in fact been paying for every printed script issued with a barcode for close on a decade, and decided to recommend cutting back on these subsidies.