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The Ministry of Health of Ukraine together with Medical Procurement of Ukraine launched a pilot of the e-Stock accounting system for medicines and medical devices. The main consumer of the functionality is healthcare institutions. They will submit requests for necessary medicines and medical devices that will be purchased at public expense through the e-Stock system. This will optimize the process of collecting needs, and make it better and more systematic. 

The query collection and user management modules were launched in the first stage. 

The goal of the pilot is to test and, if necessary, refine the functionality of collecting the necessary medicines and medical devices so that in the future it will cover all medical products that Ukraine will purchase for patients. 

“Every year Ukraine allocates significant funds for the purchase of medicines, but patients do not always have information about their availability. On the other hand, the lack of an integrated system that would allow tracking, evaluating purchases, distributing and recording medicines leads to gaps in planning. Therefore, the goal of implementing e-Stock is to improve the inventory management of medicines and medical devices. Directly for patients, this means the availability of information about medicines,” says Mariia Karchevych, Deputy Minister of Health for digital development. 

“Previously the need for medical products that the state should purchase for Ukrainians was collected in most cases at the oblast level. Some goods were purchased by Medical Procurement of Ukraine, others by international specialized organizations. There was no solution that would combine all this data at the hospital user level and standardize the collection of needs, regardless of who is the buyer of a particular direction. The e-Stock requirement collection functionality solves this problem. This will make it possible to see the overall picture and plan the procurement process better,” explains Aliona Zhuzha, Deputy General Director of Medical Procurement of Ukraine for the development of IT technologies. 

Collecting needs and managing users is the first stage of e-Stock development. In general, it is planned to complete all the functionality by the end of 2023: procurement, logistics, balance accounting and public data modules. 

It should be recalled that e-Stock will collect a full cycle of data on the turnover of medical products. The system will aggregate information about the needs, delivery, and availability of drugs in hospitals, their use, disposal, etc.

162 healthcare institutions and structural divisions on health issues of regional and Kyiv city military administrations are already connected to the system and will submit needs for medical products for 2023 through e-Stock in the areas of “Adult Oncology”, “Endoprostheses and Transplant Kits”. 

The pilot of the system was launched with the support of international partners: the USAID Project “Safe, Affordable and Effective Medicines for Ukrainians” (SAFEMed) and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria.