The Kanta medication list is an up-to-date electronic summary of an individual’s medication and related notes. The medication list is nationwide and can be accessed through the pharmacy and patient information systems connected to the Kanta Prescription Service.
Individuals can view the information in MyKanta.
The Kanta medication list must be deployed in health care and social welfare organisations no later than 1 October 2027.
Benefits of the Kanta medication list
The Kanta medication list brings significant benefits to professionals, individuals and the health care and social welfare service system.
- For professionals, the list provides a centralised view of the patient’s medication. This reduces recording work and supports decision-making with the help of structured data.
- Individuals have a comprehensive and up-to-date view of their medication in one place: MyKanta. This supports commitment to treatment and increases medication safety.
- At the service system level, the medication list improves patient safety, reduces the harmful effects and costs of medicines, and enables knowledge-based management.
How does the medication list work?
The medication list is automatically generated from the data in the Prescription Centre and updated whenever structured medication data is saved. This means that professionals do not need to separately maintain the list as it stays up to date as part of the normal recording practice.
The medication list will be deployed in phases
Phase 1: structured dosage and changes to the Pharmaceutical Database
In the first phase, the following were enabled in the systems
- structured dosage
- changes to the Pharmaceutical Database.
Health care organisations were required to have at least one verifiably forward-compatible system by May 2022.
Structured dosage brings many benefits:
- it enables a faster and safer way of recording dosage data when prescribing medicines
- it reduces spelling mistakes and improves patient safety
- dosage information can be checked automatically, which supports the correctness of the medication.
In addition, structured data makes it possible to control reimbursements and dispensing intervals and makes it easier to automatically produce instructions for using medicines from the system.
Organisations were required to implement structured dosage by the end of 2025.
In connection with the changes made to the Pharmaceutical Database (2022 version), support for prescribing biological medicines and a structured separate report were introduced in the systems. The new version also includes data fields that support structured dosage, etc.
Phase 2: Kanta medication list of outpatient prescriptions
In the second phase, the Kanta medication list will be deployed for prescriptions written in outpatient care. As a result, professionals will have access to one comprehensive and up-to-date medication list for the patient.
Phase 2 schedules
- In the wellbeing services counties, the deadline for introducing a forward-compatible version is the end of 2026.
- Deployment of the Kanta medication list for the Prescription Centre and pharmacy systems will take place in early 2027.
- The joint testing of the Kanta medication list by patient information systems must be completed by June 2027.
- The Kanta medication list must be deployed in all patient information systems no later than 1 October 2027.
Transition period after deployment of phase 2
When phase 2 of the Kanta medication list has been deployed, a transition period of approximately three years will begin.
A lot of unnecessary prescriptions, such as parallel orders for the same product, may still be visible on the medication lists during this period. These clearly unnecessary prescriptions must be deleted from the medication lists during the transition period. Deleting is part of updating patient medication information.
Phase 3: OTC products and review and attention notes
In phase 3, the medication list will also be expanded to cover the OTC products recorded by professionals. The OTC products recorded by individuals themselves will be introduced at a later stage.
At this stage, professionals can also record review and attention notes on the medication list that will be visible to professionals. Individuals can view the review notes in MyKanta.
After the extensions made in phase 3, it will also be possible for social welfare professionals to view a client’s medication details. This will improve the flow of information between health care and social welfare and increase patient safety. Viewing the medication details is possible if the social welfare service provider is using a system that enables it.