The Conservative Party is seeking a committee investigation into government contracts related to a soon-to-be-cancelled IT program for doctors, which reportedly cost $250 million to develop and operate.
The program, PrescribeIT, was meant to make it easier for doctors to renew prescriptions by instantly sending drug prescriptions to pharmacies, but the program is set to be shut down at the end of May 2026 due to low adoption rates.
Health department spokesperson Emmanuelle Ducharme told The Epoch Times that the use of PrescribeIT had been “below anticipated levels,” with less than 5 percent of prescriptions now being filled through the program.
Ducharme said that with low uptake among health-care providers and a lack of a cost-sharing model between the federal government and the provinces and territories, “it has been decided to transition to national e-prescribing standards.”
PrescribeIT’s annual costs amounted to $35 million in recent years, adding up to over $250 million since the program launched in 2017, according to Canada Health Infoway, a federally funded not-for-profit that operates PrescribeIT. Some of that funding went to Telus Health, a subsidiary of Telus Corporation, the main developer of the program.
Speaking in the House of Commons on April 14, Strauss, a former physician, said tech entrepreneurs and software developers told him PrescribeIT should have cost between $1 million and $5 million to operate.
“There is no way this should have cost $250 million. They were spraying money from a fire hose,” Strauss said, adding that the program is being cancelled because it “didn’t work.”
Strauss also accused Parliamentary Health Secretary Maggie Chi of “filibustering” the motion for two hours to prevent the documents’ release.
“Why is she doing it? Why won’t she just let the taxpayers see this contract so we can all stop this sort of waste and mismanagement from going forward in the future under this new government,” Strauss said.
Chi said the Liberal government worked on PrescribeIT to move Canada’s health system toward “safe, secure and efficient prescribing that could deliver real benefits to Canadians and to the healthcare providers.”
While the intention was for PrescribeIT to become self-sustaining, Chi said, it became “clear that the program wasn’t achieving that very goal,” and the government decided to end PrescribeIT after consulting the provinces and “the people who actually use the program.”
When Strauss again asked why the Liberals would not release the contracts, Chi replied that PrescribeIT did not have “the pickup among doctors and pharmacies it needed to make the system self-sustaining.”
