Key Development
Vietnam’s e-prescription rollout has moved beyond an optional digitization exercise. By 2026, electronic prescribing is required across the healthcare-provider system — but the strategic value lies less in replacing paper with QR codes than in making each prescription an identifiable, traceable and potentially interoperable data object.
Under Circular 26/2025/TT-BYT, hospitals were required to implement electronic prescribing before October 1, 2025, with other healthcare facilities following before January 1, 2026. E-prescriptions are created, digitally signed, shared and stored electronically and carry the same legal value as paper prescriptions. Patients can use QR codes to retrieve medicine names, dosing instructions and treatment information.
The framework also embeds patient identifiers into prescriptions, consolidates medicines from multiple specialties into a single prescription during one visit and allows prescriptions of up to 90 days for eligible conditions among 252 diseases and disease groups.
Why It Matters
- A prescription becomes structured healthcare data rather than a document.
- One prescription across specialties can reduce duplicate therapy and interaction risk, particularly in multimorbid patients.
- Longer prescribing changes chronic-care economics. Up to 90 days of therapy can reduce unnecessary return visits for clinically stable patients.
- Pharmacy connectivity could strengthen prescription enforcement. The Ministry of Health says linked prescribing and dispensing systems can help identify incorrect prescriptions or medicines sold inconsistently with prescriptions.
Healthcare Insight Analysis
Healthcare Insight believes the key distinction is between:
electronic prescribing
and
closed-loop medication management.
In the first model, a physician issues a digital prescription, the patient receives a QR code and the prescription enters an electronic system.
Useful — but incomplete.
The more powerful model is:
diagnosis → prescription → dispensing → refill → adherence → outcome.
If the healthcare system knows what was prescribed but not what the patient actually obtained, how much was dispensed or what the patient is still taking at the next encounter, it sees only the clinician’s intention to treat, not the treatment journey.
This is why Vietnam’s work on standardized APIs connecting pharmacy software, distribution systems, ERP platforms and the national pharmaceutical database is strategically important. The technical framework covers drug information, inventory movements and retail sales data.
Connecting prescribing data with dispensing data creates a different class of capability.
Consider antimicrobial stewardship:
what was prescribed → what was actually sold → quantity dispensed → whether prescription-only medicines are being purchased outside the intended pathway.
Vietnam’s Ministry of Health has explicitly linked e-prescribing and pharmacy connectivity to tighter control of antibiotic misuse and controlled medicines.
The opportunity may be even larger in chronic disease.
A 90-day hypertension prescription should not merely become a digital document that exists for three months.
A mature system could turn it into a continuity signal: Was medication collected? Was the refill delayed? Was therapy changed? Did the patient return when clinically appropriate?
That is the transition from transaction digitization to population-health infrastructure.
However, digitized fragmentation remains a major risk.
If hospitals, clinics and pharmacies all create digital records but use incompatible drug dictionaries, identifiers and interfaces, Vietnam could generate millions of e-prescriptions without creating a usable longitudinal medication record.
The strategic KPI should therefore evolve beyond:
“How many prescriptions are electronic?”
Toward:
how many prescriptions have reliable patient identification → how many are linked to dispensing events → how many medication conflicts are detected → how many chronic patients maintain treatment continuity.
There is also a governance dimension.
The more complete the medication dataset becomes, the more valuable it is for clinical decision support, public-health surveillance and health-services research — but also the more sensitive it becomes. Access, purpose limitation and auditability need to expand alongside interoperability.
Market Implications
Hospitals: medication reconciliation and decision support can become the next high-value layer of EMR adoption.
Retail pharmacies: pharmacies increasingly become nodes in a national medication-data network rather than isolated dispensing outlets.
Pharma: richer prescribing patterns could improve visibility into treatment pathways, subject to strict privacy and permitted-use governance.
Health-tech: interoperability, drug master data and embedded workflow integration may become stronger competitive moats than standalone e-prescription interfaces.
ANALYTICAL MATRIX
| Dimension | Current Layer | Next Value Layer | KPI to Watch |
| Prescription | Digital creation/signature | Structured prescribing data | Valid e-prescription rate |
| Identity | Patient ID attached | Longitudinal medication record | Identity match rate |
| Pharmacy | Connectivity expanding | Closed-loop dispensing | Prescription–dispensing linkage |
| Chronic care | Up to 90-day prescriptions | Adherence monitoring | Refill continuity |
| Oversight | Better traceability | Stewardship/anomaly detection | Duplicate/error alerts |
Vietnam’s e-prescription transition should therefore not be judged by whether patients still need to carry paper.
Removing the paper is the easy part. The real value begins when the system can reliably answer four questions: what was prescribed, what was actually dispensed, what the patient is currently taking and whether treatment is continuing as intended.
If Vietnam closes that loop, prescription data could become one of the most valuable infrastructure layers in its digital-health ecosystem.
Source: https://suckhoedoisong.vn/don-thuoc-dien-tu-nguoi-dan-can-biet-gi-khi-di-kham-169261009171034138.htm