The key problems of the construction of systems to monitor health services, including prescriptions/medicines, are analyzed from the viewpoint of the payer - disposer of the public financial resources allocated to health care. The problems include: identification of the set of source data corresponding to the needs and requirements of financial management and safeguarding the high data quality.

A minimum set of data about a monitored, individual health service is determined. The authors stress the significance of connections between different kinds of data about a health service and between the data about different services (prescriptions) prescribed and provided to one patient.

Strategies and practical solutions to data quality problems are discussed on the basis of the Medical Services Register (MSR), its different versions and variants. Tools and procedures to guarantee the high quality of data as early as the recording stage are presented. The importance of authorization of a health service (prescription) by the patient is stressed. The authors discuss the mechanism and role of consecutive - in a chronological order - numbering of health services provided to a given patient. The significance of a close, tight circulation of documents and data in the system for guaranteeing the data quality is underlined. Selected versions and variants of MSR system are compared in respect of their capacity to provide high quality monitoring data. The authors claim that the MSR variant is equivalent, as to its information content, to a health services carnet and electronic card.

The authors stress the necessity of legally regulating the key issues related to monitoring in health care. They postulate to establish two related systems (e-MSR and e-ZOZ) and to implement a permanent quality audit of the source data.