The federal government is moving ahead with regulatory changes to allow PBS medicines to be prescribed without the need for a paper script, but participation will be voluntary and doctors will retain complete control over all scripts, it says.

Responding to the independent King Review of Pharmacy Remuneration and Regulation, which called for an ePrescribing system as a matter of urgency, the government said work was already underway through an electronic prescribing working group (EPWG) established in 2016 to make electronic forms of PBS scripts a legal form of prescription.