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Paper short abstract

The European Health Data Space imagines a future where medical prescriptions will be redeemable across Europe with ease. Where do patients’ meantime practices fit in imaginaries of the future?

Paper long abstract

By 2029 the 450m+ citizens of the European Union (EU) and European Economic Area (EEA) are supposed to be able to redeem their electronic prescriptions in any EU or EEA member state—at least that is the future imagined by the European Health Data Space (EHDS), a landmark EU legislation which entered into force in 2025.

Three years to go we are today in the meantime of the EHDS, its promises “neither fully realized nor fully speculative” (Montgomery et al., 2026). Some countries, notably Finland and Estonia, have been offering interoperable prescriptions for over half a decade. Meanwhile, Germany was one of the last countries to roll out electronic prescriptions domestically in 2024 and is yet to implement interoperability with its European peers.

The EHDS promises one prescription redeemable across all its member countries, envisioning pharmacy visits abroad as frictionless and mundane as those at home. Yet these kinds of imaginaries are hardly a substitute for the medications sought out—today—by the mobile European citizenry. Thus, while waiting for the cross-border electronic prescriptions to materialize, patients utilize a myriad of other means to acquire medications (from) abroad; means that often demand additional labour from their prescribers and pharmacists. In this paper, we explore the tension between, on the one hand, the imaginaries of easily accessible medications and, on the other hand, the arguably more laboursome meantime practices patients engage in. In other words, a tension between the possible and desirable, the present and future, the meantime and the imaginary.