PrescribeIT has shut down: what Canadian pharmacies should do now

PrescribeIT, Canada’s national e-prescribing service, ceased operations at 11:59 PM EST on May 29, 2026. If your pharmacy received electronic prescriptions through it, those prescriptions now arrive as faxes again. The fastest fix is an intake path that turns those faxes back into structured data without adding staff. Here is the full picture and your realistic options.

What actually changed on May 29

PrescribeIT was the federally funded service, operated by Canada Health Infoway, that moved prescriptions electronically from prescriber EMRs to pharmacy management systems. At 11:59 PM EST on May 29, 2026 it stopped accepting and transmitting prescriptions. Renewal requests, cancellations, dispense-status updates, and secure clinical messaging all stopped on the same date.

For a fuller brief with sources, see the PrescribeIT shutdown explainer.

Why it was shut down

Infoway cited low adoption and an unsustainable funding model. After more than $250 million in federal investment since 2017, fewer than 5% of Canadian prescriptions ever flowed through the service. A $0.20-per-prescription pharmacy fee introduced in 2025 pushed adoption down further: a 2024 Canadian Pharmacists Association survey of 1,300 pharmacists found 65% would stop using PrescribeIT if a fee was added. Most did, and the program lost its funding.

What it means for your pharmacy

The immediate, concrete impact is fax volume. Prescriptions that used to arrive as structured electronic data now arrive as faxes and emails that someone has to read and type into your pharmacy management system.

For a typical community pharmacy on Kroll handling around 200 prescriptions a day, going from automated intake back to manual entry adds roughly 5 to 8 hours of staff data-entry time per day. That is pharmacist and technician time spent typing instead of checking and counselling.

A national open prescribing standard published by Infoway on May 1, 2026 is meant to replace PrescribeIT over time, but realistic vendor implementation runs 6 to 18 months. Until your pharmacy management system vendor adopts it, fax is the default.

Your options now

There are really four:

1. Do nothing and absorb the fax surge. Zero setup, but the most expensive in staff hours and the highest transcription-error risk.
2. Hire to cover the typing. Solves throughput, raises payroll, and is hard to unwind once the open standard arrives.
3. Wait for the Infoway open standard. Free in licensing terms, but you carry months of fax workflow while vendors catch up.
4. Automate intake now. Keep your existing Kroll workflow and let AI read incoming faxes and enter the prescriptions, with a pharmacist verifying before any dispense.

We compare all of these honestly, including options that are not ours, in the PrescribeIT alternatives roundup.

The fastest path back to electronic-grade intake

If you are on Kroll, AI fax-to-Kroll automation reads each incoming fax or email, extracts the patient, drug, dose, sig, refills, and DIN, and enters the prescription directly into Kroll in about 30 seconds. It runs on-premise, so patient data stays inside your store, and every prescription lands in your pharmacist verification queue before dispense. See how it works for pharmacists.

Most pharmacies are live within about a week of the first call. To see it on your own setup, pick a 30-minute demo slot and we will walk through it.