Ottawa shut down its $298-million e-prescribing program
Ottawa has shut down PrescribeIT, the federal "axe the fax" program built to replace fax machines for sending prescriptions between doctors and pharmacies, after spending close to $300-million on a service that never carried more than five per cent of the country's prescriptions. Here is what happened, and how OIATC reads it.
The program. PrescribeIT was run by Canada Health Infoway, a government-funded non-profit, from 2017, and built by Telus Health. It went offline on May 29, 2026. Adoption never arrived: fewer than five per cent of prescriptions in Canada were sent through it. A fee of twenty cents per prescription, introduced in 2025 to help fund the service, pushed some pharmacists to drop it.
The money. Early estimates put federal spending around $250-million. Health Canada told a House of Commons committee the actual figure was more than $298-million, of which about $98-million went to Telus.
The intellectual property. A Telus executive said the company kept about 85 per cent of the intellectual property behind PrescribeIT and is considering relaunching it. Health Canada confirmed the government holds no intellectual property in the program it paid to build.
The fallout. The executive who led Canada Health Infoway was later removed from the role, and Conservative MPs asked the Auditor General to investigate the spending. Ottawa said PrescribeIT will be replaced by a national e-prescribing standard it hopes private health-technology companies will adopt.
The First Nations layer. Canada Health Infoway's own Indigenous health program listed First Nations-led deployment of PrescribeIT among its partnership lines. So a system chosen federally, built by a vendor that kept the rights, and switched off from the centre was, in part, being deployed into First Nations settings.
How OIATC reads it. OIATC has published a position arguing the failure was one of governance, not technology. Adoption was assumed and mandated from outside rather than grown from the people who had to use it, a pricing change made in Ottawa drove users away, and the rights to a public investment ended up in private hands. The question OIATC keeps asking is who chose the system, and who can change it.
What replaces PrescribeIT, and whether the communities a system serves get any say in choosing and governing it, is the thing to watch.