ePresS: How Electronic Prescriptions Work Under YAKAP

The ePresS (Electronic Prescription Slip) is the official PhilHealth document that records what a YAKAP Clinic doctor prescribed, in generic-name form, together with the prescribing physician's PRC license, PTR, and S2 numbers. It is generated immediately after any encounter where medicines are prescribed, given to the beneficiary, and becomes the link between the doctor's SOAP consultation and what the pharmacy dispenses under GAMOT.

For clinic owners and doctors running or starting a YAKAP practice, getting the ePresS right is not paperwork for its own sake — it is a condition of both first- and second-tranche capitation, and an audit trail PhilHealth checks against the pharmacy's GAMOT Availment Slip.

What Exactly Is the ePresS?

The ePresS is the electronic prescription counterpart to the eKAS (Konsulta Availment Slip): where the eKAS documents diagnostics performed, the ePresS documents medicines prescribed. Both are defined in PhilHealth Circular No. 2024-0013, which requires providers to "generate and print the Electronic Konsulta Availment Slip (EKAS) or its equivalent immediately after each patient encounter" and the ePresS, or its equivalent, for prescribed medicines. If a consultation ends with a prescription, an ePresS is a required output of that visit — not an optional add-on.

What Information Does the ePresS Contain?

The ePresS carries a facility and physician section on top of the prescription itself, per the official template in Annex H of PC 2024-0013:

Facility header — HCI Name, Case No., HCI Accreditation No., Transaction No., the patient's PIN, Membership Category, Membership Type (member/dependent), and the Authorization Transaction Code (ATC), mirroring the eKAS.
The Rx area, marked "USE GENERIC NAME" — every medicine must be written by its generic name rather than a brand.
Next Dispensing Date — the date the beneficiary is expected to return for a refill or follow-up.
Physician block — Physician name, PRC LIC No., PTR No., and S2 No.
Patient feedback section — mirroring the eKAS, the beneficiary confirms whether medicines were received and rates satisfaction as Happy, Neutral, or Sad.

The PRC (Professional Regulation Commission) license identifies the doctor is licensed to practice; the PTR (Professional Tax Receipt) confirms the physician's local professional tax is current; the S2 number is the license required specifically to prescribe regulated (dangerous) drugs. All three fields exist on the template because a prescription without a verifiable prescriber is not a valid claim document.

When Is the ePresS Issued?

The ePresS is issued at the same point in the workflow as the eKAS: immediately after the patient encounter, whenever medicines were prescribed. In practice that means:

The beneficiary completes registration, First Patient Encounter, and a PCU liveness check before or at the consultation, per PhilHealth Circular No. 2025-0017.
The doctor conducts the consultation and decides on a treatment plan.
If medicines are prescribed, the clinic generates and prints the ePresS on the spot.
The beneficiary signs — or thumbmarks if unable to write, with a parent or guardian signing for minors — and gives feedback on the slip, exactly as required for the eKAS under PC 2024-0013.
The clinic keeps the reply-slip portion; the accomplished slip with an anonymized patient satisfaction survey must reach PhilHealth by the 10th working day of the month following the applicable quarter.

The rest of the eKAS/ePresS mechanics — what the diagnostics grid looks like, how the reply-slip submission works — is covered in What Is the eKAS?.

How Does the ePresS Relate to GAMOT Dispensing?

The ePresS is the clinic-side prescription record; GAMOT is the benefit that pays for the medicines once the beneficiary presents that prescription at an accredited pharmacy. The two are linked but not identical, and the GAMOT rules under PhilHealth Circular No. 2025-0013 add requirements on top of the ePresS template:

The prescribing physician must confirm the patient's identity and "shall abide by International Classification of Diseases 10th Edition coding standard," accurately encoding the ICD-10 diagnosis for each prescription.
Prescriptions generated through the GAMOT App carry a computer-generated Unique Prescription Security Code (UPSC), plus the beneficiary's name, age, sex, and address; each medicine by generic name (per the Generics Act, RA 6675) with dosage strength, form, quantity, and directions; a follow-up date if applicable; and the physician's name, signature, and license number.
Maximum quantities apply: maintenance medications up to three months, NSAIDs up to one week, other medicines per DOH clinical practice guidelines.
Before writing a new prescription, the physician must check for existing active prescriptions and honor, revise, or cancel-and-reissue them depending on the molecules, dosage, and how much was already dispensed.

At the pharmacy, the beneficiary presents the prescription — or simply states the UPSC code plus a government-issued ID — and the pharmacy generates a GAMOT Availment Slip per transaction, showing what was dispensed and the remaining balance against the beneficiary's P20,000-per-year GAMOT limit (a separate P20,000 applies per qualified dependent). The GAMOT List now covers 75 molecules across 242 preparations. Note that even when a doctor prescribes a maintenance drug for the full three months, the pharmacy dispenses only one month per visit — the prescription stays valid so the patient can return for the remaining refills, which is also why follow-up visits matter for monitoring.

Why Accuracy on the ePresS Affects Your Clinic's Payment

Prescription and dispensing data encoded from the ePresS chain feeds directly into two of the four weighted second-tranche performance indicators — antibiotic dispensing for communicable disease and NCD medicine dispensing — which together carry meaningful weight in the performance factor that determines the 60% year-end tranche. An ePresS that is missing, illegible, or mismatched with what was actually dispensed shows up as a gap in that data. For the full payment mechanics, see how YAKAP clinics get paid, and for empanelment prerequisites that must be in place before a prescription counts toward capitation, see the YAKAP Empanelment Slip guide.

How RecordKo Handles ePresS End-to-End

RecordKo generates the ePresS directly from the doctor's SOAP consultation, pulling prescribed medicines, generic names, dosage, and duration straight from the prescription section — with a per-medicine include toggle so only what is actually being prescribed and dispensed feeds the ePresS and the underlying XML. The clinic's physician profile (name, PRC, PTR, S2) is stored once and applied automatically to every ePresS and eKAS the clinic prints, and prescriptions pre-fill from the patient's last consultation so refills don't mean re-typing a regimen from scratch. Because the same encounter also drives the encrypted T2 XML claim, an ePresS generated in RecordKo stays consistent with what gets submitted to PhilHealth and with what the pharmacy will later log against GAMOT.

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