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.

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. 

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.

Accelerate Estonia in cooperation with the Ministry of Social Affairs and the State Agency of Medicines have analyzed whether the service can be brought to market within the existing legal framework. The analysis found that there are hypothetical ways in which the service can operate within the existing legal framework. However it needs developmental efforts from the public and private sectors to merge existing distance sale practices with this new operating model.