At Elevate, founders call out barriers holding back Canadian healthtech

Canadian entrepreneurs at Elevate Festival claimed employers and policymakers are holding up the adoption of healthtech aimed at building families and aging gracefully.

“We don’t have 13 healthcare systems, we have 13 ‘sick care’ systems.”

Industry leaders at two panels identified key barriers in funding, procurement, slow-moving policymakers, unsupportive employers, and a lack of proactive care. They also shared potential solutions.

Braze Mobility founder and CEO Pooja Viswanathan noted that her startup, which is building blind spot sensors for wheelchairs, has had “a really tough time” securing financing in Canada, but faced a much easier path south of the border.

“Even though we’ve created innovation here, we’ve had to go to the US, like a lot of other [Canadian] healthtech [and] medtech companies,” Viswanathan said. “It’s really unfortunate because Canadians are not able to really take advantage of Canadian innovation.”

Fellow panellist Alex Mihailidis, a University of Toronto professor who works with Age-Well, said this is why the aging tech network has focused much of its efforts on policy. Mihailidis said Canadian policymakers have been saying “all the right things,” are aware that contending with Canada’s aging population is a big issue, and know tech can help.

But Mihailidis likened this work to “pushing a big rock up a very large hill.” He argued that “the actions in Canada have not been where they need to be” on the age tech front compared to some of the country’s global peers.

Mihailidis contended that the provincial jurisdiction of Canadian healthcare has made policy changes more difficult. Even so, he thinks some provinces have been doing a better job than others, singling out British Columbia and Alberta as positive standouts and Ontario as a laggard.

Domestic procurement has long been a challenge in Canadian healthtech, with critics citing a lack of transparency and an unwillingness to take risks. Ontario has been trying to improve in this respect.

Rhonda Zwingerman, co-founder and chief medical officer at Twig Fertility—which is using a combination of brick-and-mortar clinics and tech to make fertility care more accessible— thinks a more proactive approach could also unlock the potential of Canadian healthcare.

“We don’t have 13 healthcare systems, we have 13 ‘sick care’ systems,” she argued. “We’re really quite good at reacting to emergencies and urgent things, but we’re pretty bad at proactively keeping people healthy.”

While Canada has universal healthcare, fertility is often beyond its scope. That can be a problem given that common treatments like in vitro fertilization are expensive and time-consuming. Sprout Family co-founder and CEO Jackie Hanson sees an important role for companies to play here.

Hanson, whose startup is working to make fertility benefits more accessible by helping employers adopt them through its digital platform, argued that Canadian businesses need to implement strong parental leave policies and provide fertility coverage to employees. She felt that there is a business imperative to do so.

Hanson said many Canadian workers still take out big lines of credit and refinance or sell their homes to cover the costs of fertility treatments. She also claimed these workers are carrying “a massive psychological weight” that can negatively impact their productivity and availability. The absence of such policies can also lead top employees to leave companies as they start families, she said.

“Employers have a unique advantage—they can remove barriers, they can normalize conversations, and they can create more education in ways that institutions and governments are just not doing very well right now,” Hanson said.

Image courtesy Elevate. Photo by Brandon Ferguson Media.