Over-the-counter drug delivery courier service

Accelerate Estonia, in cooperation with Bolt and Wolt, is bringing an over-the-counter (OTC) drug courier delivery service to the market and is analyzing the legislative obstacles related to the service.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, home delivery of restaurant and store orders via courier has become a daily occurrence in larger cities around the world. Through consumer research, service providers have clearly identified that the primary missing product category—which platforms do not currently offer in Estonia but for which there is clear customer demand—is pharmacy goods, specifically OTC medicines.

Parallel to the analyses of the self-service pharmacy project within the Accelerate Estonia program, it has been clearly established that by providing the population with more efficient, 24/7 access to essential OTC medicines, the burden on emergency medicine and ambulance services is reduced. Both services are currently at the brink of their capacity, and the national healthcare system is facing a shortage of funds.

Based on all of the above, there are clear economic and socio-economic upsides for enabling the service. Today, the distance sale of medicines is already fully legalized and functional; however, the law was written at a time when the nature of rapid courier services could not be taken into account. Due to this and the general pharmacy reform, there are technical elements in the Medicinal Products Act that make providing an economically viable courier service extremely difficult or even impossible.

Courier delivery of medicines is not extraordinary in itself; the service has been introduced globally in recent years, including in Latvia and Lithuania.

Accelerate Estonia—an innovation program of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications—in cooperation with the Ministry of Social Affairs and the State Agency of Medicines, is analyzing how to enable the courier delivery of medicines in a market-viable way while simultaneously ensuring risk mitigation in the operation of the service.