Monitoring a national e-prescription system with IBM Instana - SÚKL case study

Executive summary

Eywo deployed IBM Instana across SÚKL's critical eRecept e-prescription platform, giving the internal operations team end-to-end observability, faster root-cause isolation, and objective telemetry to drive vendor collaboration delivered in weeks, within strict security constraints.

Abpit client

The State Institute for Drug Control (SÚKL) is the Czech government agency responsible for regulating pharmaceuticals and medical devices. Operating under the Ministry of Health, it supervises the manufacturing, clinical evaluation, and marketing of medicines, sets maximum ex-factory prices and reimbursement rates, and directly manages critical state digital infrastructure including eRecept and ePoukaz.

About the eRecept system

eRecept is the official Czech electronic prescription system, classified as critical state infrastructure. External hospital, doctor, and pharmacy software integrates via a secure REST API using JSON; medical professionals authenticate with qualified electronic certificates, while citizens use the national NIA gateway (such as BankID), with authorized API requests managed via JSON Web Tokens (JWT). The scale is national: over 500 million prescriptions issued since the mandatory 2018 launch, 56 million SMS prescriptions in 2024 alone (roughly 65% of all issued prescriptions).

The challenge

SÚKL needed robust monitoring for eRecept, with three objectives:

• Proactive issue detection: identify performance bottlenecks and stability issues before they reach end users.
• Root-cause isolation: give the operations team deep telemetry to quickly tell whether a problem originated in the application code or the underlying infrastructure.
• Vendor collaboration: equip the internal team with precise, actionable data to hand to external software suppliers for rapid resolution.

The solution

Eywo deployed IBM Instana across the eRecept environment. The scope covered comprehensive environment preparation and architecture tailored to SÚKL's strict requirements, full compliance with the institute's security standards, and a seamless handover of complete operational documentation and user guides. Implementation completed within a few weeks.

Results

The internal operations team gained full visibility into the eRecept application. SÚKL can now proactively maintain application health, significantly shorten troubleshooting, and back vendor requests with clear, objective telemetry.

Eywo designs and implements observability, ITSM, and infrastructure solutions for enterprise clients across regulated industries. If you're planning a similar project, get in touch.