PGEU (Pharmaceutical Group of the European Union)

PGEU welcomes the initiative for a Council Recommendation on cardiovascular health checks. The Recommendation should recognise community pharmacists as providers of cardiovascular checks, actively contributing to providing these type of services to the population in a cost-benefit way. The call for evidence identifies missed opportunities to detect hypertension, high glucose and high cholesterol.

PGEU welcomes the aim of this draft Implementing Regulation to make dataset catalogues for secondary use standardised and interoperable. High-quality metadata can support public-interest research, public health, pharmacovigilance and evidence on medicines use. However, the catalogue must be a transparency tool, not a gateway to commercial exploitation of sensitive health data.

Part 2. Most community pharmacies are SMEs and costs will likely be passed on by vendors. The principle of proportionality should explicitly include an assessment of negative net impact in highly digitalised countries.

Part 1 PGEU supports MyHealth@EU as the common infrastructure for cross-border primary use of electronic health data. For community pharmacists, it will deliver value only if it makes cross-border ePrescriptions safer, faster and legally clear at the pharmacy counter, while preserving confidentiality and continuity of supply.

PGEU welcomes the aim of the draft Implementing Regulation to make cross-border identification and authentication reliable for personal electronic health data. For community pharmacies, these rules matter at the point of care: pharmacists must identify the patient, prove professional authorisation for access to his/her data and limit such access only to the data needed for safe dispensing and care.