Exteriors of the Telus Tower located at 25 York At. in downtown Toronto, photographed January 24 2011.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
A unit of phone giant Telus Corp. has acquired Wolf Medical Systems, a company that provides online health records sharing for doctors.
Financial terms of the deal, announced Thursday, were not revealed.
The Telus Health Solutions unit said the transaction will create a new line of business for the company that will focus on doctor electronic health record services.
Since 2010, more than 11 million patient visits have been documented by doctors using Wolf's electronic medical records system.
Telus said it plans to merge Wolf's Internet-based technology with the phone operator's secure, wireless and wireline broadband communications networks.
"Electronic medical records (EMR) are an essential building block to an efficient healthcare system in Canada," said Paul Lepage, senior vice-president, of Telus Health Solutions.
"Canada's EMR penetration rate of about 32 per cent lags behind other OECD countries. By committing to the EMR market with a best-in-class solution, combined with the connectivity that our wireless and wireline broadband networks enable, we are positioned to help increase this adoption rate which will in turn improve work processes, efficiencies in service delivery, and patient health outcomes."
Telus Corp., Canada's second-biggest phone company, has been growing rapidly into other communications businesses.
It created Telus Health after it bought the former Emergis, a Montreal-based e-commerce and technology company that was an early pioneer in electronic health records.
As provincial governments seek to contain soaring health care costs, electronic health records are touted as a way to make health care delivery more efficient and less costly.