The acceleration of artificial intelligence is touching almost every sector at a rapid pace, including in the Canadian medical industry.
While AI in healthcare is not a fresh concept, it’s now receiving more recognition and funding from the government. In June, Canada’s Minister of AI and Digital Innovation, Evan Solomon, announced $3.5 million in funding for the Vector Institute’s HealthSpark program, an initiative supporting AI innovation in Canadian health care services. This includes funding for the 2025/26 cohort that consists of three new additions: Verto, MedMe and Tenomix.
“Vector’s HealthSpark initiative is empowering Ontario’s boldest innovators to accelerate AI-driven solutions to some of health’s toughest challenges, from diagnostics to primary care and beyond,” said Roxana Sultan, Chief Data Officer and Vice President, Health, Vector Institute, in a statement.
One of the solutions these companies are creating is a way to organise health data using models that will expedite referrals while keeping information safe.
Verto transforms patient data into patient journeys through a digital twin. This keeps information from patients’ visits to various care practices and integrates them into one platform. Their proprietary platform reads free text and determines if it’s talking about a diagnosis, medication and converts it into structured data within the Verto system, says Verto Founder and CEO Michael Millar.
“People always complain about how hospitals or their doctors only know one aspect of their care. Right? With this technology, they’ll be able to see data from hospitals, from their primary care, from community care, from home care, all in one location, and be able to know, be able to visually see that they are, that that data is correct.”
Millar says Verto uses AI to process the information and stores it in a “box” that only the primary care physician can access. It doesn’t mix together, unless told to do so with a referral or through the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.
“If [a medical professional] sends a referral, then they know they can access that data, and our system can detect whether or not they have that if they’re part of the circle of care, and then use that knowledge to combine the data to create one snapshot,” says Millar. Adding, patients can always see a complete snapshot of their care.
One of Verto’s largest deployments is with British Columbia’s Fraser Health system. Millar says the company is working with them to create a digital twin for all two million of Fraser Health’s patients.
Heading into the HealthSpark program this year, Millar says Verto will be working to make it easier to ask questions and get more detailed responses from the system. He says this will build better trust in the system’s AI security capabilities.
“Quite often, in order for clinicians to understand the data, they need to rely on other resources to process the data for them. So what we want to do is we want to create a layer where the clinician can just use natural language to ask questions of their roster,” says Millar.
Joining the HealthSpark program within the same cohort is the digital pharmacy services platform MedMe Health.
Christine Kim, Chief of Staff at MedMe, says it was started six years ago to address the shortage of pharmacists in the country. With the additional regulatory changes in Canada, allowing pharmacists the power to prescribe medication for minor ailments, but their systems were stuck in drug dispensing mode, not designed for clinical care.
“If you go to your family doctor, they’re probably taking notes in a pre-text field so they’re able to just jot down whatever they feel is necessary to be jotted down, whereas pharmacists…have very rigid documentation templates that they have to work with to be to be successfully reimbursed,” says Kim. “So because of that complexity, we do help with kind of that standardized templates for clinical documentation, and then we also help with the patient communications.”
MedMe has been rolling out AI features over the past year, including its Clinical Assistant scribe. This feature transcribes consumption and organises information into auto-filled clinical documents. The feature also has a database of thousands of peer-reviewed documents for supplementary pharmaceutical research.
MedMe is used in various small pharmacies as well as big chains like Rexall and Shoppers Drug Mart. According to Kim, independent pharmacies are more open to using the AI-based features of the product compared to larger corporations.
“Procurement decisions are a lot faster and easier for indies, especially those that are more open to adopting innovative solutions. So currently, a majority of our AI feature users are independent,” says Kim.
As MedMe joins the upcoming Q4 HealthSpark cohort, they want to focus on advancing more complex AI capabilities for integration into the platform. One of the upcoming features is their patient concierge. This system will be able to automate prescription refill reminders and book follow-up appointments, among other soon-to-be-released features.
Kim says, “Into 2026, we have several other AI products within our product roadmap. So we’re looking forward to taking some of those ideas and kind of developing and cooperating with them on those, but beyond concierge.”
Original: AI prescribed: Algorithms are changing Canadian healthcare