Cancelled federal ‘axe the fax’ digital prescription program gets new life in Quebec
Quebec said it will operate its version of PrescribeIT, known locally by its French-language name Prescription Québec, with provincial funds. The main technology vendor will remain Telus Health, which collected about a third of the federal spending on the program and retains ownership of most of the intellectual property. Canada Health Infoway launched PrescribeIT in 2017 as part of initiatives to replace fax machines with digital alternatives for sending prescriptions between doctors and pharmacists.
- ▪Quebec said it will operate its version of PrescribeIT, known locally by its French-language name Prescription Québec, with provincial funds.
- ▪The main technology vendor will remain Telus Health, which collected about a third of the federal spending on the program and retains ownership of most of the intellectual property.
- ▪Canada Health Infoway launched PrescribeIT in 2017 as part of initiatives to replace fax machines with digital alternatives for sending prescriptions between doctors and pharmacists.
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| Original publisher | The Globe and Mail |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/economy/article-axe-fax-digital-prescription-quebec-prescribeit/ |
| Publication time | Mon, 27 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 |
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Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Open this photo in gallery:A pharmacy worker counts pills for a prescription in Montreal in March, 2021.Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian PressShareSave for laterPlease log in to bookmark this story.Log InCreate Free AccountA federal “axe the fax” digital prescription program that was shut down earlier this year after low uptake, contentious parliamentary hearings and nearly $300-million in spending has been given new life as the Quebec government plans to roll out the platform widely to the province’s doctors and pharmacists. Quebec said it will operate its version of PrescribeIT, known locally by its French-language name Prescription Québec, with provincial funds.
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