PrescribeIT is back, but only in Quebec: what Prescription Québec means for the rest of Canada

PrescribeIT shut down across Canada at 11:59 PM EST on May 29, 2026. Seven weeks later, on July 17, 2026, Canada Health Infoway and Santé Québec announced a four-year agreement to keep the same platform running in Quebec under the name Prescription Québec, and to expand it to the province’s roughly 1,900 community pharmacies. If you run a pharmacy or clinic anywhere else in Canada, nothing changed for you: your prescriptions are still moving by fax. Here is what happened, why Quebec got a different outcome, and what it means for your intake workflow this fall.

The short version

Nationally, PrescribeIT is gone. The federally funded service ended May 29, 2026. Infoway published a national e-prescribing open standard in the spring and left adoption to provinces and vendors.
In Quebec, it never really stopped. Ottawa granted a three-month extension in late May, and on July 17 Santé Québec and Infoway signed a four-year deal. Quebec’s Health Ministry pays the operating costs.
No per-prescription fee. Quebec pharmacists do not pay the $0.20-per-prescription charge that collapsed adoption elsewhere. That single difference is most of the story.
TELUS Health is still the vendor. TELUS built the platform, received roughly a third of the federal spend over the program’s life, and retains most of the intellectual property.
Nobody else has revived PrescribeIT. As of September 2026 no other province has announced a comparable agreement. New Brunswick is moving to a different network, RxNet from Leap Orbit, with no public go-live date yet, and no EMR or pharmacy-system vendor elsewhere has shipped an implementation of the open standard. The province-by-province status has the details.

How the Quebec deal came together

The timeline matters because it shows how close Quebec came to losing the service too.

May 14, 2026. Radio-Canada reported that PrescripTIon Québec, the provincial pilot of PrescribeIT, was set to be deactivated on May 29 along with the national service. The pilot, running since May 2024 in the Estrie region southeast of Montreal, connected 8 clinics (138 physicians) with 14 pharmacies. In participating pharmacies, more than half of prescriptions were arriving electronically, against a national PrescribeIT rate below 5%. Physicians and pharmacists described the prospect of returning to paper and fax as “a huge setback.”

May 22, 2026. The federal government granted Quebec a three-month extension so the pilot could keep running while the province and Infoway negotiated. Quebec Health Minister Sonia Bélanger said a return to older technology was “not feasible.”

July 17, 2026. Santé Québec and Infoway announced the agreement: a four-year term, operating costs covered by the Quebec Health Ministry, and a mandate to continue the rollout. The Ordre des pharmaciens du Québec welcomed the deal on July 22, saying it was essential to preserve “an electronic solution that works.”

July 27 to 29, 2026. The Globe and Mail and Canadian Healthcare Technology reported the details: 283,000 electronic prescriptions processed by July 10, four pharmacy chains participating (Groupe Jean Coutu, Brunet, Uniprix, and Proxim), and a plan to reach all 1,900 retail pharmacies in the province, which earlier provincial materials targeted for 2027-2028.

On the prescriber side, Omnimed is the only EMR integrated with the platform so far. The company says the provincial rollout will remove roughly 7,000 faxes a day that its users currently send to pharmacies for prescriptions alone, before counting renewal requests and other clinical messages.

Why it worked in Quebec and not nationally

Three things lined up in Quebec that did not line up elsewhere.

Someone paid for the plumbing. The national program fell apart when federal funding tapered and Infoway tried to recover costs with a $0.20-per-prescription pharmacy fee. A 2024 Canadian Pharmacists Association survey of 1,300 pharmacists found 65% would stop using the service if a fee was introduced, and they did. Quebec covers the operating cost from the provincial health budget, so pharmacies pay nothing per prescription.
A concentrated, willing network. Estrie had eight clinics on one EMR and a handful of chain pharmacies. That is a manageable pilot, and it produced a usage rate above 50% that the province could point to when it asked for money.
Provincial ownership. The rest of Canada was waiting for a federal program to keep paying. Quebec decided the tool was provincial infrastructure and budgeted for it.

None of those conditions exist by default in Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, or the other provinces today.

What it means outside Quebec

If you are a pharmacy or clinic in any other province, the practical picture in September 2026 is unchanged from June:

Pharmacy intake is fax. Prescriptions that used to arrive as structured data from PrescribeIT now arrive as faxes and scanned emails that someone has to read and key into Kroll, Propel Rx, Nexxsys, or Filware. For a typical 200-prescription-a-day store, that is roughly 5 to 8 hours of staff data-entry time per day. The Kroll automation guide walks through what that looks like and how to get the time back.
Clinic transmission is print-and-fax. Prescribers still write inside OSCAR Pro, Accuro QHR, TELUS PS Suite, Microquest, or WELL Health, but the electronic path to the pharmacy is gone. The clinician page covers the replacement path EMR by EMR.
The open standard is still paper. Infoway’s national e-prescribing standard exists and is free to adopt, but a standard is not a service. Until an EMR vendor and a pharmacy-system vendor both implement it and connect, nothing moves. No vendor outside Quebec has announced a shipping date.
TELUS holds the cards. Because TELUS Health retains most of the PrescribeIT intellectual property and owns both the largest EMR footprint (PS Suite) and the dominant pharmacy system (Kroll), a TELUS-led relaunch in another province is the most plausible route back to a national-style service. There is no public timeline for one.

There is one more thread to watch. After parliamentary hearings into the program, Infoway’s former CEO was dismissed and the federal government announced an audit and a competitive procurement for an independent assessment. That process could reshape how any future national e-prescribing effort is funded, but it will not move a single prescription this year.

What to do this fall

Quebec pharmacies and clinics: ask your pharmacy-system vendor and EMR vendor where you sit in the Prescription Québec rollout schedule. If you are on Omnimed, you are first in line on the prescriber side. Everyone else is waiting on their vendor’s integration. In the meantime, the fax workload is the same as everywhere else.

Everyone else: plan on fax being the transmission layer through at least mid-2027, and fix the intake side now rather than waiting on a vendor roadmap you do not control. We lay out every realistic option, including doing nothing and waiting for the standard, in the PrescribeIT alternatives comparison. If you are on Kroll and want to see fax-to-Kroll automation on your own workflow, book a 30-minute walkthrough.

Sources

Radio-Canada, “Des pharmacies et des cliniques du Québec forcées de revenir au fax” (May 14, 2026)
Radio-Canada, “Ottawa intervient pour éviter le retour au fax dans des pharmacies du Québec” (May 22, 2026)
Gouvernement du Québec, “Prescription Québec : Santé Québec poursuit le déploiement du projet” (July 17, 2026)
Ordre des pharmaciens du Québec, “Prescription Québec : une solution à maintenir et à déployer” (July 22, 2026)
The Globe and Mail, “Cancelled federal ‘axe the fax’ digital prescription program gets new life in Quebec” (July 27, 2026)
Canadian Healthcare Technology, “Cancelled PrescribeIT program restarted in Quebec” (July 29, 2026)
Les Affaires, “Omnimed, premier DMÉ intégré à Prescription Québec, se prépare à un déploiement provincial” (2026)

Frequently asked questions

Is PrescribeIT coming back in Canada? Only in Quebec, as Prescription Québec, under a four-year provincial agreement signed July 17, 2026. No other province has announced a relaunch.

Who pays for Prescription Québec? The Quebec Health Ministry covers operating costs. Pharmacies pay no per-prescription fee.

Is Prescription Québec the same software as PrescribeIT? Yes. It is the PrescripTIon platform built by TELUS Health for Canada Health Infoway, operated for Quebec under the new agreement.

Which EMR works with it today? Omnimed is the only integrated EMR as of September 2026; pharmacies join through their certified pharmacy system as the rollout expands.