Canada's growing health technology sector can help relieve pressures on limited resources.Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press
The federal government recently introduced Bill C-72, or the Connected Care for Canadians Act, aimed at bringing personal health information into the digital age.
Improving sharing between health-care providers may not be a panacea for all that ails the Canadian system, but it does point to the role technology could play in its future, including innovation in the private sector to support government-led initiatives.
“Health-tech startups are essential to Canada at this moment, due to the fact that they are able to fill the gaps in the system very quickly,” says Gevorg Nazaryan, CTO and co-founder of Docus, an artificial-intelligence-powered health platform. “Startups are able to help deploy expandable models of care, facilitate better triaging of patients, and provide more effective remote care.
“In particular, digital health solutions help cut the line and free those who are on the front lines.”
Docus aims to make a doctor’s time less about paperwork and more about patient care by using AI to streamline internal processes, administrative work and data analysis.
“Adoption of our platform, for instance, helped one rural clinic increase operational efficiency … which allowed them to serve more patients without compromising care standards,” Mr. Nazaryan says. “My co-founders and I were keen to build a platform that would allow clinicians to make right and prompt decisions and at the same time eliminate all other forms of waste in the process.”
Mr. Nazaryan adds he is a firm believer in the transformative power of AI when it comes to health care, a view shared by John Russo, vice-president of health care solutions at software firm OSP.
“My co-founders and I saw the potential use of AI and data-driven solutions for many of the inefficiencies that have plagued the system,” Mr. Russo says. “In building solutions like AI-driven diagnostics and workflow automation, we free health care providers to spend less time performing administrative work and more time with the patients.”
One recent breakthrough came with a telehealth platform for a rural Canadian health network.
“These communities often have challenges in access to specialists and timely care,” Mr. Russo says. “We were able to integrate AI into the platform, enabling this network to triage patients more effectively and bridge them to the right specialists virtually. The results are crystal clear: a reduced wait time, efficiency in the usage of health care resources, and much better patient outcomes.
“What’s more important, though, is the equity it drives, as that lets people in rural areas get the same level of care as urban centres do. It does go a long way to fight inequity in health care access.”
Nimble, agile experimentation, he adds, is the contribution startups are able to bring to the wider health-care ecosystem.
“They experiment, iterate, and scale up much quicker than most organizations can manage. It’s a fair definition of what so well equips them to introduce digital tools and solutions that could take some of the pressure off the system, help things run smoother, and therefore help improve patient care.”
There’s also a need for solutions specifically built with a Canadian context, says Rishi Nayyar, co-founder and CEO of PocketHealth, an app that allows patients to access their medical records and imaging.
“Most of the health-tech solutions used in Canada are built in the U.S., and they don’t always align with our unique health care delivery model or the principles of universal care,” he says. “We saw an opportunity to build a Canadian solution, tailored to our system and centred around patient empowerment.”
In the case of PocketHealth specifically, the ability for someone to access their own imaging, for example, could reduce unnecessary radiation exposure by avoiding duplicate scans. On the system side, Mr. Nayyar says, it helps reduce waste and the admin burden. It also improves follow up rates by using reminders and clear explanation of complex medical terms.
“Patients are better equipped to take action, helping address the current issue where 60 per cent of follow-ups go uncompleted, often leading to delays in care,” he says, adding that replacing physical image records, such as those stored on CDs, has been particularly helpful in remote communities where patients once had to travel to retrieve them.
“By providing instant online access to imaging records, we help ensure that patients in these regions can share their medical information with providers across different locations quickly and securely, leading to more timely and co-ordinated care,” he says. “It’s all about creating a smoother, more connected health care journey for every patient.”
That holistic patient journey is the conundrum that ODAIA Intelligence Inc., co-founded by University of Toronto academics, seeks to understand and improve.
“ODAIA’s mission is to reduce time to therapy for patients everywhere,” says co-founder and CEO Philip Poulidis, a serial entrepreneur who comes from a medically minded family, including his father who retired as chief operating engineer at Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto.
To simplify a complicated process, ODAIA uses AI and machine learning to help pharma companies market their drugs to physicians.
“Sales teams are a company’s most important resource in educating doctors about new treatment options for their patients,” Mr. Poulidis says. “The pharma field force is also one of the most significant investments companies make. This was our ‘a-ha’ moment.
“We knew AI could play a major role in helping sales find, reach, and educate the right doctors, dramatically speed the time from diagnosis to treatment, and get the right therapies to millions of patients faster. Nobody was doing it by fully leveraging scalable AI.”
A sales rep who works for a top pharmaceutical company, for example, was recently making a sales call to a physician about a specific disease. ODAIA’s AI identified that there was an additional approved medication that might be helpful to the doctor’s patients, and which they might not have been aware of.
“It’s a great example of how ODAIA AI is ensuring patients get the therapies they need, when they need them,” Mr. Poulidis says, adding AI enables his company to automate what previously would have taken months manually.
“Take our work with a specialty pharma company. We identified 18,000 previously overlooked doctors as highly relevant and discovered 200 new physicians with potential patients. The result? A 9-per-cent increase in new patients starting therapy,” he says.
“Imagine these sorts of results on a much larger scale, and you can truly understand how the power of AI can improve health outcomes and health equity for patients everywhere.”
It is the patients, not the technologies, that all of these innovators say they ultimately come back to.
“My advice for aspiring health tech founders is to always think patient-first and work backward from there,” says PocketHealth’s Mr. Nayyar. “If you build something that genuinely helps patients, everything else will follow.”