Big AI Investment Means to Support Canada’s HCPs, Patients

In July, DIGITAL, Canada’s Global Innovation cluster for digital technologies, announced its largest-ever commitment to advancing artificial intelligence (AI) technologies for healthcare by funding more than one third of all costs for Health Compass II, a 4-year initiative to provide healthcare innovation and interoperability throughout the country.

Health Compass II is a collaboration among WELL Health, ORX, HEALWELL AI, Tali AI, Phelix and Simon Fraser University. The initiative aims to use AI to reduce burdens such as administrative tasks that contribute to clinician burnout and to facilitate clinical decision-making, thus improving outcomes for patients.

“The clusters are independent, not-for-profit organizations,” Justin Simard, spokesperson for Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, told Medscape Medical News. “They are responsible for selecting and funding projects that benefit, grow, and meet the evolving needs of their innovation ecosystems.” 

Ecosystem development (or the establishment of a network of people and organizations to create innovations in a given field) is what sets the Global Innovation Clusters program apart from other innovation funding programs, Simard explained. The clusters are not just funding projects. The model has succeeded in “creating stronger ecosystems, de-risking the adoption of technology, maximizing the value of intellectual property, and forging new partnerships that increase firms’ market potential.”

Health Compass II has been funded to do just that, according to DIGITAL’s Vice President of Communications and Public Affairs, Cheryl Muir. “The Health Compass I project made substantial strides in reshaping electronic medical records (EMRs) through AI integration,” she told Medscape Medical News. “The development and successful deployment of Tali AI’s voice assistant demonstrated the initial feasibility and desirability of natural language interfaces in clinical settings, saving nearly 12,000 collective hours monthly in clinical documentation by physicians that used Tali AI’s technology.”

“In addition,” she said, “major development efforts with ORX’s patient navigation technology for referral pathways demonstrated feasibility and expedited their commercial potential with WELL Health.”

The second phase of the Health Compass project, the recently funded Health Compass II, is building on the intellectual property created by the original Health Compass project in voice-assistant and patient-navigation technology, she explained. “It is also providing new opportunities and accelerated commercialization for additional Canadian small- and medium-sized enterprise partners with the additions of Phelix and HEALWELL to the consortium, thus providing additional technology modules for greater EMR interface, interoperability, and functionality for greater effectiveness of care delivery.”

Help For Canada’s Healthcare System Problems?

Medscape Medical News has previously reported on some of the problems faced by Canada’s healthcare system, including, emergency department (ED) overcrowding, “routinely” diagnosing cancer in the ED, the costly use of private nursing agencies, and safer supply programs in jeopardy. Physician burnout also looms large.

“Physician burnout is driven largely by the administrative tasks that take time away from patient care,” said Peder Sande, CEO of Health Compass II consortium partner ORX. “This initiative aims to reduce that burden by automating key processes such as note-taking, prescription generation, referrals, and other nonbillable patient interactions to ease the strain on physicians.

“While fully automating these workflows is a long-term goal, even incremental improvements, like using AI to assist with documentation, has already made a noticeable difference,” he told Medscape Medical News. “By streamlining administrative tasks, the initiative creates more space for physicians to focus on patient care, thus reducing the pressures that lead to burnout.”

The project is not directly aimed at alleviating ED overcrowding, Sande said, “but it has the potential to contribute in a couple of important ways.” ORX, in partnership with WELL Health, will be launching the largest outpatient clinic network in Canada to give better access to primary care and ambulatory specialty care, thus indirectly alleviating ED pressure.

In addition, by reducing administrative burdens, the platform could enable healthcare providers to see more patients in a day, he noted. “This increased efficiency may help prevent nonemergency cases from escalating, ensuring that patients receive timely care before their condition requires urgent or emergency intervention. Improved access and availability of general practitioners through the platform could discourage patients from visiting EDs or other high-cost treatment centers, such as urgent care clinics, for non–life-threatening conditions.”

Furthermore, he said, “by integrating with tools from HEALWELL AI, the platform helps identify patients with rare diseases earlier, allowing them to be routed to proper care pathways sooner. This proactive approach can reduce unnecessary hospital admissions and emergency room visits, ultimately relieving some pressure on the healthcare system.”

University Involvement

Fred Popowich, PhD, a professor of computing science and scientific director of the Big Data Initiative at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, explained why SFU was eager to be part of the Health Compass project. DIGITAL invited him to participate, he said, because it’s an opportunity for students to get involved in applied research.

“Students not only learn but also get to see how what they’ve learned can be applied to real-world problems,” he told Medscape Medical News. Students are assigned to companies participating in Health Compass ll for a 4-month period and explore how technology can help solve specific problems. Some students later gain experience working as interns for these companies.

Overall, said Popowich, “The advantage of Health Compass is that it’s not just one company working with a university or one company working with another company. It’s a whole team of companies and researchers working together. The advantage of doing it in a collaborative way is that you provide the basis for further work to be done by others or to be adapted by others. They provide the blocks for you to build, standing on each other’s shoulders rather than on each other’s toes.”

Other Projects

On September 9, DIGITAL celebrated the results of its investment of more than $500 million in Canadian-led, AI-enabled projects since its inception in 2018 by coinvesting in 11 new projects. Several among them are aimed at the healthcare sector, including AI-driven alternatives to colonoscopies for inflammatory bowel disease, AI-driven technologies to prevent and manage pressure sores, a platform to improve patient experiences with telemedicine, and a postoperative patient-management platform that assesses the risk for complications such as anastomotic leaks and respiratory depression after general and gastrointestinal surgery.

Simard, Muir, Sande, and Popowich declared that they had no relevant financial relationships.

Marilynn Larkin, MA, is an award-winning medical writer and editor whose work has appeared in numerous publications, including Medscape Medical News and its sister publication MDedge, The Lancet (where she was a contributing editor), and Reuters Health.