Infoway pulls the plug on PrescribeIT

OTTAWA – Canada Health Infoway announced that PrescribeIT, its program for e-prescribing among physicians and pharmacists, will be shut down as of May 29. It was established to support safer, more efficient prescribing, but it didn’t achieve the scale or a successful funding formula required for long-term sustainability.

According to a report in the Globe and Mail, the PrescribeIT program cost more than $250 million since its inception in 2017, and is being shuttered because the program failed to replace fax machines and provinces and territories would not share the cost of running it.

Infoway said the program would be replaced by a “national e-prescribing standard” that it hoped other health-technology companies would adopt.

“Canada Health Infoway will continue to maintain the standard to support national consistency and enable provinces, territories, and vendors to adopt and apply it in ways that align with their respective priorities and timelines, consistent with national approaches to secure health information exchange,” chief executive officer Michael Green (pictured) said in a statement.

Although thousands of pharmacies and doctor’s offices across the country had signed up with PrescribeIT, few were using it. The government estimated that fewer than 5 percent of prescriptions were sent through PrescribeIT. Most are still sent by fax or on paper.

The Globe and Mail reported earlier this week that Canada Health Infoway had tried to find a private company to take over the service in recent months. But that process was not finished before the non-profit’s board – made up largely of federal, provincial and territorial government representatives – moved to cancel the program altogether.

The service had largely been funded by the federal government. Canada Health Infoway’s public records suggest PrescribeIT’s annual costs were $35 million in recent years, adding up to more than $250 million since 2017.

Some of those funds went to Telus Corp. subsidiary Telus Health, which was the main developer of PrescribeIT. The Globe previously reported that Telus retains ownership of much of the intellectual property of PrescribeIT.

Guillaume Bertrand, spokesperson for health minister Marjorie Michel, said the service’s low adoption and the lack of a “federal-provincial-territorial cost-sharing model” ultimately ended the program.

“Since its introduction, and despite the extensive work of our partner Infoway, the adoption remains below anticipated levels,” Mr. Bertrand wrote in an e-mail.

He said the government’s focus is now on the recently introduced Bill S-5, which aims to make it easier for patients and health care providers to share and access health data, including medical records.

It sets common standards to link health databases and prohibits companies from blocking the transfer of data, which is an issue that has been flagged by the federal Competition Bureau as making it difficult for doctor’s offices to switch software providers.

PrescribeIT had begun charging pharmacies a $0.20-per-prescription fee in 2025 to use the service, which the Canadian Pharmacists Association has cited as a reason for its low use among pharmacies.

The Canadian Pharmacists Association (CPhA) had urged Canada Health Infoway to delay the implementation of its proposed $0.20 per transaction fee for PrescribeIT, stating that the fee would place significant financial pressure on pharmacies nationwide and likely result in pharmacies dropping out of the program.

In a survey of more than 1,300 Canadian pharmacists conducted in 2024 by CPhA, a majority (65%) of respondents said they would stop using the PrescribeIT service altogether if the fee is introduced.