Is my treatment reported to the FOPH?

What MeCanna is

MeCanna is the online reporting system of the Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH, German: Bundesamt für Gesundheit, BAG) for medical treatments with cannabis medicines. The FOPH collects data on these treatments for the scientific evaluation of the law and for statistical analysis (Art. 8b BetmG). It runs an information system for this purpose, and treating physicians must record the data in pseudonymised form (Art. 18f BetmG).

The results are made available to the cantonal enforcement authorities, to treating physicians and to interested research institutions (Art. 8b BetmG). The data do not go to the road traffic office; see reports to the road traffic office.

Which prescriptions are reportable

The FOPH describes the scope as follows (Art. 8b para. 1 BetmG; FOPH page on MeCanna):

• Every prescription of a cannabis medicine with a total THC content of at least 1 percent is reportable.
• For THC-containing medicines authorised by Swissmedic and used within their authorised indication and pharmaceutical form, recording is optional.
• Medicines that contain only CBD, and cannabis extracts with less than 1 percent total THC, are not reportable, because they are not subject to the Narcotics Act.

The threshold is the same one percent limit that decides whether hemp counts as a narcotic (BetmVV-EDI, Annex 1).

Which data are recorded

The physician records three groups of data (Art. 65b para. 2 BetmKV):

• about the patient: a patient code, year of birth, sex, weight and canton of residence;
• about the physician: name, address and federal postgraduate titles;
• about the treatment: the date of the prescription, details of the treatment and of the medicine prescribed, and the course of the treatment up to its end.

Physicians may use the AHV number (the Swiss social security number) for the patient code: a one-way encryption turns it into the same pseudonym every time, and only the treating physician may process the AHV number together with the patient code (Art. 65a BetmKV).

When, and for how long

Data are recorded immediately after the first prescription, after the first and after the second year of treatment, and at the end of the treatment if it ends before the end of the second year (Art. 65b para. 3 BetmKV). According to the FOPH, this applies to new prescriptions and also to continued prescriptions of treatments that were already running on 1 August 2022.

The data collection is limited in time. Articles 8b and 18f BetmG apply from 1 August 2022 until 31 July 2029, and the Federal Council may decide earlier that no more data have to be recorded if no new data are needed for the evaluation. After the data collection ends, the data are kept in the information system for at most ten years, and the FOPH publishes statistical analyses every year (Art. 18f para. 4 BetmG; Art. 65e and 65f BetmKV).

If our physician Oxana Smagulova issues a reportable prescription, which happens only where medically indicated, she records the data, as every prescribing physician must (Art. 18f BetmG). There is no entitlement to a prescription; the physician decides on the basis of the medical assessment.