The short answer
Med Access is TELUS Health’s web-based EMR for Canadian primary care. It is used across Alberta, British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland, usually reached at a clinic-specific address ending in med-access.net, and it is the most configurable mainstream EMR a Canadian family doctor is likely to work in.
That configurability runs on templates. Understand how they are built and you understand why Med Access fits your clinic so well, and why documenting a visit takes as long as it does.
How Med Access templates are built
Templates live under the Templates menu, on the Obs tab, which opens the observation templates. During a visit you right click under Observation and pick a template to apply.
An observation template is a set of discrete fields grouped under named sections, and Med Access shows those section titles in the visit note, so a template built on SOAP presents Subjective, Objective, Assessment, and Plan as separate places to write. Fields can be read-only where a value should display but not be edited, and they can be lists you pick multiple values from. Encounters are dynamic too, so which observations and alerts appear depends on the conditions already recorded for that patient.
Templates go well beyond the visit note. Clinics build task templates, billing templates applied across a panel through Reports, clinical decision support triggers that fire on the right patients, and referral and requisition templates published by provinces and divisions. Building them takes admin-level access, which is why most clinics have a small number of people who understand their own template library.
Why that is both the point and the problem
A well-built Med Access template is a real asset. It encodes how your clinic works, keeps the chart structured rather than narrative, and makes your data reportable later.
The cost is that a structured template has to be filled in a structured way. Every field is a place to put something, and every field is a click, a decision, and a small piece of typing. The better your template, the more places there are to fill. That is the trade every Med Access clinic makes, and it is where the time goes.
If you already run an AI scribe, you have met this. It generates a clean note, then hands it back as one block of text, and dropping that block into the first field defeats the template. You either paste it whole and lose the structure, or you sit and cut the note apart yourself, field by field, at the end of a clinic day.
Medulla fills the template field by field
Medulla splits the generated note and files each part into its own field. Subjective goes to Subjective, Objective goes to Objective, and Assessment and Plan land where they belong, in the template your clinic built rather than in one block in the first box.
This only works because Medulla runs inside the encounter you already have open rather than in a separate tab, and because it reads the chart as well as writing to it. It is also specific to EMRs like Med Access that have real fields to fill, which is why it is the first thing Med Access clinicians tend to notice.
Filing the note is one part of the visit. Medulla also proposes the chart updates the visit calls for, suggests billing codes grounded in what is in the record, answers clinical questions about the patient in front of you, and lets you call the patient from the same encounter screen. The Med Access overview walks through all of it for a Med Access practice.
See it on your own charts. The trial is free for a month with no credit card required.
Charting done before the patient leaves the room.
Medulla works inside Med Access and Oscar-based EMRs, on the encounter you already have open.
No credit card required.