The bright future for Canadian Healthtech innovation

Without a doubt, the past few years have been uniquely challenging for the Canadian healthcare system. The exceptionality of the COVID-19 pandemic not only created immense stress on the operational?and care giver capacity to deliver healthcare; it also created unprecedented changes to the dynamics of demand and usage of our healthcare system by the Canadian population

The reality is the aftereffects of the pandemic will continue to echo for years across Canada as we look to restabilize. Frankly, many challenges lay ahead. CIHI estimates 600,000 fewer surgeries were carried out in the first 22 months of the pandemic compared with 2019. In Ontario alone there were 951,000 fewer breast, lung, colon or cervical cancer screenings when you compare 2020 and 2019. 1 in 3 Canadians needing healthcare in the first year of the pandemic reported delaying contacting a medical professional. (Image credit to StatsCan)

The unrealized future impact of these numbers on Canadian population health is sobering, but the overall impact is broader – the entire healthcare system had to pivot, adjust and adapt under incredible pressure. There was significant impact on the human element of the healthcare system – the physicians, nurses, personal support workers, radiologists, surgeons, public health officials, lab technicians and countless other key players who were constantly being asked to do more with less; less time, less resources, less clarity.

The mental health toll is hard to measure fully, but we have some indicators- unsurprisingly, ?StatsCan reports that 9 in 10 Canadian nurses reported feeling more stressed at work during the pandemic, with job stress and burnout remaining a top concern for many of the medical professional associations.

But despite these challenges, grit, ingenuity and adaptability was on full display across the Canadian healthcare space. Extraordinary efforts were made in every corner of the healthcare system to keep things afloat. Critical cancer surgeries did occur and save lives. The overall death toll of COVID-19 was blunted, with Canada reporting the second lowest deaths per million among the G10 nations. Many key aspects of the healthcare system kept running effectively - hundreds of thousands of healthy babies were delivered during the pandemic, in a herculean organizational effort, 86.2M does of COVID-19 vaccines were delivered, and many, many Canadians were able to receive quality, timely care despite the intense pressure on the system.

Now as we pass the midpoint of 2022, and look forward, it is inspiring to see how resilient and adaptable the health system in Canada continues to be. From extreme adversity often comes innovation and aspects of positive change, and in particular the role technology can play in supporting, augmenting and enhancing our healthcare system was brought into strong focus as lessons learned from COVID-19 are revisited. Many adoption trends for advanced technology in Canadian healthcare were accelerated by the pandemic. Rapid adoption of secure virtual care solutions transformed delivery of many healthcare services. Online collaboration tools bridged the gap between care teams and patients. Digital front door solutions empowered more patients to be fully informed on aspects of their care pathway, and investments in data and analytics platforms allowed for more precise decision making.

However, despite this promising traction, there are many problems still to solve, efficiencies to find, and improved patient outcomes to strive for, which was why it was so inspiring to see the work being carried out by Calian, in partnership with L-Spark, to ignite the next wave of healthtech advances with Canadian innovation at the forefront.

June 15th marked the culmination of 6 months of incredible work to select, develop and grow a new cohort of Canadian healthtech innovators, showcased at a demonstration day highlighting four innovative solutions looking to improve healthcare in Canada and beyond.

After proceeding through a rigorous selection process, these organizations were selected to receive extensive coaching, technology assistance and mentorship from the experts at Calian and L-Spark, plus one other very unique benefit - ?access and training on Calian’s Azure based healthcare platform as a service, the Corolar platform. This platform is a perfect foundation for innovative, use case based SaaS solutions, as it core functionality is to provide secure integration across a wide range of EHR/EMR systems – bringing the key data inputs and outputs to the forefront for solutions to take advantage of, compliantly, securely and performantly.

“How can we do more with less time?”

Complex Care Plan by Coalese focuses on solving a very specific problem – reducing physician overhead when creating a complex care plan for their patients. Headquartered in Alberta, the Coalese team saw an opportunity to create a solution that could take key data from typical EMR systems and streamline the creation of a complex care plan in a highly automated fashion, allowing physicians to spend more time on direct patient care. Additionally, the platform leverages an analytics layer to add insight to the care plan creation process, incorporating best practices and national guidelines to help physicians develop the optimal complex care plan for their patients unique requirements.

“How can we intelligently match supply and demand and optimize resource allocation?”

Nexi by Alio Health solves another critical challenge for healthcare workforce by providing an intelligent platform to automate staffing assignments, care workflows, care delivery monitoring and also offers capability to provide secure virtual care services. Developed as a modern, cloud based, modular system, Nexi simplifies and streamlines multiple administrative workloads that can be customized for the specific needs of any healthcare organization. Similar in some ways to an Enterprise Resource Planning solution, but tailored for healthcare, Nexi acts as a powerful force multiplier to drive higher levels of efficiency and resultingly better standards of care for a wide range of health providers.

“How can we give patients a clearer voice?”

Lime tackles another challenge facing healthcare organizations in Canada and elsewhere in the world – how to streamline patient feedback loops and give patients a stronger voice as they proceed along their care pathway. As a solution for complete patient experience management, the Lime platform allows for simple, rapid setup of patient feedback capture mechanisms for a wide range of medical teams. With EHR integration, multilanguage support and a flexible backend for data capture and analytics, Lime provides any healthcare organization with the tools and processes to immediately start to capture and action patient input and feedback. While critical for ongoing continuous improvement activities, the value of ensuring patients can express their feedback simply, quickly and securely and ensure they feel engaged along their care journey cannot be underestimated.

“How can improve primary care access to specialists?”

Virtual Hallway looks to solve another problem in the healthcare system, based on a simple premise – if you reduce barriers in connecting Primary Care Practitioners and specialist physicians you can get more timely, better patient outcomes. Their secure cloud based platform allows Primary Care Practitioners to access a wide network of specialists to request consultations quickly, easily and in compliance with provincial data privacy and billing regulations, replicating that “5 minute hallway chat” between professionals which can often save hours or even days of back and forth when determining best path forward for a patient.

All four solutions solve quite different challenges for healthcare organizations, but when you look at their fundamental approach they all represent pragmatic, intelligent applications of technology to solve problems identified by people who really, really understand our healthcare system.

Technology is not a panacea for solving operational challenges in healthcare or any other industry, but the right combination of accurate problem identification, deep subject matter expertise and intelligently designed software will unlock massive benefits and efficiencies across the Canadian healthcare space.

The road ahead for improving our healthcare system will remain a long and challenging one. COVID was an acid test for our healthcare system, and many weaknesses were highlighted; but also it also surfaced a multitude of areas for improvement.

Fortunately, we have an incredibly rich technology ecosystem here in Canada and a vast amount of world leading expertise in healthcare delivery and operations, but we can do better at marrying these elements together and igniting the next wave of growth and innovation, and its just phenomenal to see Calian and L-Spark lead the way in sparking our next wave of Canadian healthcare innovation.