New eVisit provider coming to New Brunswick

FREDERICTON, NB – Health minister John Dornan (pictured) said Woodstock-based eVisitNB will continue to provide virtual healthcare services to New Brunswickers for another 90 days after March 31. Last month, the province announced that eVisitNB’s contract wouldn’t be renewed and instead a new company would take over the service.

Foundever, a Luxembourg-based company who operates the province’s 811 Telecare service, is supposed to take over by April 1.

Dornan told reporters this week the company is not ready, CBC News reported.

“The new provider is not ready to take over the service as of April 1 and we are expecting eVisit and the new provider to work together so that as of July 1, people will experience the same benefits,” said Dornan.

He added that despite the new provider not being ready, “it’s not fair to say there is a delay.”

Dornan also said Foundever doesn’t have a signed contract with the province to do the work.

“We are negotiating with the new provider currently … it’s in the middle we’ve identified a preferred provider, we’ve been talking with them and we’re very close to signing a contract,” said Dornan.

He said there were 11 applicants to take over the service and Foundever was the province’s first choice. Dornan said there’s no reason to believe the first choice won’t deliver the service.

Dornan said New Brunswickers will have “seamless” virtual care with no gaps during the next few months of transition.

The 90-day extension is built into eVisitNB’s four-year contract, which expires this month.

But, opposition parties don’t believe Dornan’s claim that the extension doesn’t signal a delay.

“We don’t have a contract with Foundever and that’s not a delay? I don’t know what else you’d call it – mismanagement, incompetence,” said PC MLA Bill Hogan

Hogan, the representative for Woodstock-Hartland, is hoping eVisit will still have a chance to renew their contract.

“I would like to see the contract be extended indefinitely because it works really well and I don’t know why we want to reinvent the wheel when it already works well,” said Hogan.

The Green Party also had a pitch to replace Foundever.

Leader David Coon thinks the delay will give the Liberals time to consider Vitalité Health Network to take on the service.

“Bring virtual health care into the public system rather than negotiating with another company to run it privately,” said Coon.

Deputy minister Eric Beaulieu told members of the legislature the government was satisfied with the level of service from Woodstock-based eVisitNB but wanted to go beyond that with greater integration into the primary care system.

The company was aware of that when the province issued a request for proposals last fall, he told MLAs on the public accounts committee.

“The organization that is currently providing the services was able to submit and be evaluated just like everyone else within that process,” Beaulieu said.

“It would have made my life and the life of government much easier had the same proponent that is offering it today been the successful proponent providing the best service going forward.

“They were not selected because the proposal that we received from another proponent met the requirements stronger.”

For example, Beaulieu said 50 per cent of eVisitNB users have a doctor or nurse practitioner and the department wants to ensure information from virtual visits are shared with those primary care providers.

He provided no specific numbers on how often that doesn’t happen.

Controversy erupted last week when it was revealed that eVisitNB, launched by Woodstock physician Dr. Hanif Chatur in 2020, would be dropped by the province effective March 31.

Instead, the province chose Luxembourg-based Foundever to begin offering the service, which allows New Brunswickers to interact with nurse practitioners via a website or app to be diagnosed and prescribed medication.

CBC News said the dollar value of the new contract isn’t known because the agreement hasn’t been signed yet.

Foundever already provides New Brunswick with the 811 Telecare service, for which it was paid $8.6 million last year.

The company is based in Luxembourg and was created in 2021 after the acquisition of Sykes, a company that had been operating the 811 service since 1997.

Dr. Chatur said in an emailed statement on Sunday that he was “very disappointed” to lose the contract.

He said eVisitNB had a million consults with 300,000 New Brunswickers since the province began covering the service through Medicare in 2022.

Beaulieu told MLAs that eVisitNB was awarded the contract in 2022 without a competitive bidding process.

“We designed a service with the current provider,” he said. “It was a sole-sourced approach.”

With the contract expiring this spring, “seeing what was out there, seeing what enhancements can be done … is a normal course of business,” he said.

Beaulieu repeated that eVisitNB was aware of what improvements the province was looking for.

One example of greater integration the government sought involved patients who were frequent users of eVisitNB, he said, citing one patient who used the service 90 times in a single year.

Such patients need more than virtual care, and if the online system can identify them more quickly, it would help the department fast-track them to having an actual primary care provider, he said.