Cyprus’s Health Insurance Organisation (HIO) is changing its pre-authorisation and prescribing procedures for injectable diabetes medications to address serious delays that left some patients waiting up to five weeks for approval — and in some cases forced them to interrupt their treatment.
Complaints about the delays were lodged with the Federation of Patient Associations of Cyprus (CyFPA/OSAK), with doctors reporting waits of more than a month for requests they had submitted on behalf of patients. The problem came to light at the end of April. In some cases, doctors said patients had been forced to suspend their treatment while awaiting a response from the HIO.
The HIO publicly acknowledged the problem and gave assurances that the process would be corrected. Doctors were subsequently briefed on the new guidelines.
How the new process works
Under the new HIO guidelines, doctors must now submit a pre-authorisation request simultaneously for all available strengths of the injectable medication, rather than applying separately each time a dosage adjustment is required. Approval will be granted for all strengths at once.
However, doctors may only prescribe one strength at a time. If a dosage change is needed, the first prescription must be cancelled before a new one is issued, in order to avoid errors in the GHS software.
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