what could we do for our healthcare system in canada with $500 million per year?
health care in canada is facing many challenges — physician shortages, overcrowded emergency departments and staff burnout, to name a few — each as important as the next. every jurisdiction has different needs and a different view of what is most pressing, which makes it difficult to determine what to prioritize.
in addition to these competing challenges, canada has lagged in comparison to many of our g7 counterparts in the widescale adoption of digital health tools like e-prescribing, which would help ease the administrative burden within the healthcare system. in fact, extensive scoping reviews by canada health infoway show that at full scale, the national implementation of e-prescribing alone represents an estimated $500 million (cad) in savings annually that could then be reinvested in the healthcare system.
while novel in canada, e-prescribing has been commonplace for almost a decade in countries such as portugal, finland, sweden, denmark, the u.k. and the u.s., among others. these countries have provided a valuable model for the development and implementation of prescribeit, a national e-prescribing service in canada, but we still have a ways to go to catch up and achieve nationwide adoption.