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Spain's pharmacies are finally ditching the box cutter and going digital
A new government decree marks the beginning of the end for the paper-based medicine coupon system that has cost pharmacies an estimated €80-90 million a year
If you have ever collected a prescription at a Spanish pharmacy and noticed the staff carefully cutting little barcodes off medicine boxes, sticking them to sheets of paper and filing them away, you have witnessed one of the more laborious administrative rituals in the Spanish health system. That process is now on its way out.The Council of Ministers approved a decree this week to begin replacing the traditional tamper-evident coupon system with a digital verification model, a move that Health Minister Mónica García described in characteristically direct terms. "We are saying goodbye to box cutters, stickers, and bureaucratic red tape in pharmacies, and moving towards a safer, more modern, and more accurate drug identification system," she said.
The change has been a long time coming. Despite the widespread adoption of electronic prescriptions across Spain, thousands of pharmacies have continued using the old paper coupon method, cutting barcodes from packaging, attaching them to supporting documents and sending them to the relevant authorities to claim payment for dispensed medicines. According to estimates from the Federation of Spanish Pharmaceutical Businesses, this process has been costing pharmacies around €80-90 million a year.
Under the new system, each medicine will carry a unique digital identifier that verifies its authenticity and tracks it through the entire distribution chain. García highlighted that it is "a system that allows us to reinforce guarantees against counterfeiting, improve traceability and interoperability," making it significantly harder for fake packaging to enter the legal supply chain. The change will also make it easier for hospital pharmacy services and other authorised dispensers to integrate into the verification process.
The transition will be gradual. Both systems will run alongside each other until every autonomous community has the technical infrastructure in place to make the switch fully. It is worth noting that around 22,000 pharmacies already have a system called Sevem in place, which handles the verification and authentication of medicines, so the foundations for the digital shift are already well established.
Pharmacies in Castellón have been leading the way, having adopted a DataMatrix digital code system more than a year ago, cutting their printing requirements by 90%. Once the new system is fully in place nationally, it is expected to save the equivalent of 4.9 million sheets of paper and 14 million coupon cuts per year, which gives a real sense of just how much time and resource the old method has consumed.
It is a quiet but genuinely meaningful step forward for anyone who works in or regularly uses a Spanish pharmacy.
