Telus' health division Telus Health has acquired Med Access Inc., a Kelowna-based company that offers electronic medical record (EMR) services to more then 2,000 physicians in Canada, the company announced Monday.
Telus Health would not disclose the financial terms of the deal.
Med Access Inc. is not the first EMR company that Telus has acquired in recent years – in 2012 Telus Health acquired Wolf Medical Systems and Kinlogix, and it acquired PS SUITE EMR in 2013. Over the last six years, Telus has invested more than $1 billion dollars in healthcare technology.
Last year Telus became Canada's largest EMR provider, and now provides its services to over 12,500 physicians dealing with more than 45 million patient encounters across Canada.
"EMRs are the cornerstone of emerging technologies," said Paul LePage, president of Telus Health. "We believe that connecting healthcare providers together and with their patients is a natural extension of our core business of connecting millions of Canadians with the people and information that matters most to them."
Med Access Inc. was founded in 1998 and now provides its EMR software to physicians in B.C., Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Ontario.
The company's eReferral platform will be used by Telus for all of their EMR services. "The eReferral platform offers healthcare teams the opportunity to develop a new continuity of care strategy by allowing them to electronically forward any information in a patient's chart directly to another care provider, thereby reducing potential data entry errors and helping to enhance patient care," said Brendan Byrne, vice-president of Telus physician solutions.
Paul Walker, president of Med Access Inc., said that Telus understands and supports his company's vision. "We have every confidence that Telus Health will be a great partner as we continue to develop our leading EMR platform to manage the complex demands of modern medicine and patient care."
Telus has been involved in healthcare technology since it acquired Montreal-based e-commerce company Emergis in 2007, which was an early EMR provider in Canada.
