Health Committee on May 5th, 2026

Evidence of meeting #33 for Health in the 45th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was program.

A recording is available from Parliament.

On the agenda

Briefing on PrescribeIT

Members speaking

Maxime Blanchette-Joncas

Before the committee

Vaughan Board Chair, Canada Health Infoway

El-Demerdash President, Telus Health

Ensor Strategic Advisor, Canada Health Infoway

3:50 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Sukh Dhaliwal

I call this meeting to order.

Welcome to meeting number 33 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Health.

Please wait until I recognize you by name before speaking.

As a reminder, all comments should be addressed through the chair.

For members in the room, if you wish to speak, please raise your hand. The clerk and I will manage the speaking order as best we can, and we appreciate your patience and understanding in this regard.

To the witnesses, I want you to keep an eye on the honourable member who has the floor. As soon as that honourable member raises a hand, I would like you to stop. I don't want any crosstalk, in the best interest of the health of our interpreters.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) and the motion adopted on Tuesday, April 15, the committee shall resume its briefing session on PrescribeIT.

We will be meeting for a full two hours.

I would like to welcome our witnesses.

On behalf of the committee members, I would like to welcome, from Canada Health Infoway, Dr. Vaughan, board chair, and Ms. Tania Ensor, strategic adviser; and from Telus Health, Mohamed El-Demerdash, president. Welcome.

Each organization will have five minutes for its opening statement.

With that, I will start with Dr. Vaughan.

You have the floor for five minutes. Please go ahead.

May 5th, 2026 / 3:50 p.m.

Peter Vaughan Board Chair, Canada Health Infoway

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. Thank you for the opportunity to be here.

I would like to acknowledge that the land we now call Canada is the traditional territory of first nations, Inuit and Métis peoples who have lived here since time immemorial. I recognize their enduring presence from coast to coast to coast in the spirit of reconciliation.

My name is Dr. Peter Vaughan. I am the former deputy minister of health and wellness for the province of Nova Scotia and a former emergency physician, family physician and Royal Canadian Air Force flight surgeon—a proud veteran.

I appear before you today in my capacity as board chair for Canada Health Infoway. As an independent, federally funded, not-for-profit organization, Canada Health Infoway has worked in partnership with successive federal, provincial and territorial governments to advance digital health and connected care across Canada since 2001.

Before I continue, I would like to acknowledge that the board of directors of Canada Health Infoway has recently announced a leadership transition. As of April 29, 2026, Michael Green is no longer with the organization. This reflects a board decision to ensure Canada Health Infoway’s continued focus on its mandate and to position the organization for its next phase of connected care.

The organization continues to be led and governed by the board of directors and senior executive team. The board is confident in the strength of the leadership team and the organization’s continued ability to deliver on its priorities in partnership with federal, provincial and territorial governments and health system stakeholders.

I am here today to support the committee’s work in a direct, transparent and constructive way. I recognize the importance of this review and the responsibility to provide clear and factual information.

PrescribeIT was a significant national initiative delivered within Canada’s federated health system, with shared accountability across jurisdictions.

To be clear, Canada Health Infoway’s mandate was to establish the national technical infrastructure required to secure digital prescribing in Canada and support vendors and jurisdictions to connect to that system. We delivered on this mandate.

Since its development in 2017, PrescribeIT has established a pan-Canadian foundation for e-prescribing, including standardized data structures, secure prescription transmission and integration across clinical and pharmacy systems. It enabled vendor onboarding and supported jurisdictional implementation, with approximately 95% of pharmacies and electronic medical record vendors technically integrated and with deployment across nine jurisdictions.

In 2023, following confirmation that federal funding would not continue beyond the current agreement period, the board initiated a structured sustainability review focused on three primary options: a federal-provincial-territorial cost-sharing model, a public-private partnership and an open standards approach.

Canada Health Infoway led extensive engagement with provinces and territories and engaged with 45 organizations, including tailored proposals and discussions at deputy minister and minister tables. Despite this engagement, no territory or province committed to a cost-sharing agreement, and all viable organizational proposals required ongoing public funding.

On November 12, 2025, the board concluded that an open standards model was the most responsible path forward. The open standards model would preserve public investment made through PrescribeIT by carrying forward shared national assets, including standards, tools and implementation knowledge. These support provinces and territories in implementing within their own systems, where the levers to drive adoption exist.

The board’s role has been to ensure that Canada Health Infoway delivered on its mandate, which it did. Decisions about the future of PrescribeIT were made transparently, based on evidence and in the best interest of Canadian health care systems.

I look forward to answering your questions and supporting the committee in its review.

Thank you.

3:55 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Sukh Dhaliwal

Thank you, Dr. Vaughan.

We will now go to Mr. Mohamed El-Demerdash for five minutes.

Please go ahead.

3:55 p.m.

Mohamed El-Demerdash President, Telus Health

Mr. Chair and members of the committee, thank you for the invitation. I appreciate the opportunity to be here in person.

We provided a technical expert for the April 21 meeting, but given the tight timelines, I appreciate that several important questions remained. I am here today to provide the clear, factual account the committee requires, and I will try to keep my remarks brief to allow maximum time for your questions.

To understand our work, it is helpful to view PrescribeIT not just as a piece of software but as a managed digital highway.

Over the nine-year life of this program, Telus Health received an average of approximately $10.9 million per year to build, operate and maintain the national highway. This annual fee was not a one-time purchase; it was the cost of a managed service and ensured that the highway was open 24 hours a day, with continuous security patrolling, 24-7 technical monitoring and the rigorous auditing required for national health data.

Our work covered two areas.

First, we built and operated the highway itself, the core system that allows different health care providers to talk to one another. Second, a much smaller portion supported our role as one of the many users on that highway, where we adapted our own electronic medical record systems and pharmacy products to meet the precise specifications designed by Canada Health Infoway.

From a technical perspective, the highway was a success. We delivered a 99.9% uptime record. The road was always open, it was secure and it worked exactly as intended and designed by the program owner. Over the course of the program, more than 181 million prescriptions travelled along this highway safely and securely.

We were able to launch this system effectively because Telus Health brought significant pre-existing assets to the table. Roughly 85% of the underlying technology was already built. This saved the government the time and the expense of building a new road from scratch.

I should also note that the entire team managing this project has been based in Canada, and anyone accessing personal health information would have had protected B clearance.

Finally, I want to address the challenge of adoption, or the traffic on the highway.

Telus Health was contracted to build a high-performance, six-lane managed highway. We were asked to build this capacity to meet Infoway's aggressive forecasts of 300 million annual prescriptions and 50,000-plus prescribers. We delivered that six-lane capacity, and we maintained it with 99.9% reliability for nearly a decade. However, as the technology partner, we did not control the traffic. The traffic generators—the policy mandates, the clinical workflow rules and the clinician onboarding process—were the responsibility of the program owner—Infoway and the government.

We operated the service to the specifications we were given. However, when we saw that the lanes were sitting empty and the projected traffic was not materializing, we proactively raised our concerns. We shared our technical observations through a clinical advisory board and in discussions with our partners at Infoway and Health Canada. Our message was consistent: To get traffic moving on a national scale, you need to make things easier for prescribers and mandate integration and common national standards.

We are proud of the technical integrity of the managed service we provided. We built a world-class highway that proved that national e-prescribing is technically viable.

I look forward to your questions.

3:55 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Sukh Dhaliwal

Thank you, Mr. El-Demerdash.

Before we go to the honourable members, besides the regular committee members, we have Mr. Gill subbing for Mr. Bailey.

Mr. Gill, welcome to the committee.