New Zealand Health Minister Pete Hodgson visited the Karori Medical Centre in Wellington for the formal launch of the system with Peter Moodie, medical director of Pharmac, who used to be a general practitioner at the Karori center.

The electronic "special authority" is intended to replace a much more cumbersome form-filling system required before certain medicines can be approved.

For example, Moodie says a patient on one type of cholesterol-lowering medication which is not having the desired effect can be upgraded to a more expensive type, but only if the patient's doctor testifies to their past treatment, their continuing high cholesterol levels and other pertinent data.

With the online special authority system, this information can be given and an automatic reply obtained from the computer system at the Ministry of Health's HealthPAC unit in as little as 15 seconds.

The manual form-filling system typically takes two weeks and requires a lot of human attention. Any mistakes in filling in the form have to be corrected, lengthening approval time. Validation of data entered online, by contrast, is immediate.