The Council of Canadian Innovators (CCI) is urging Canadian governments to overhaul procurement and data management to support domestic healthtech companies and reduce strain on the country’s healthcare system.
“The system needs stronger productivity, better integration, and the ability to deliver care reliably at scale.”
Patrick Searle, CCI
CCI released several recommendations today in a report titled “Care at Scale: Public Buying, Data and Better Health Care for Canadians.” Authored by CCI’s Laurent Carbonneau and Claire Wilson, the report was written in consultation with four of CCI’s scaleup healthtech member companies: Montréal’s AlayaCare, Vancouver’s Well Health, Québec City’s Petal Health, and Toronto’s Think Research, in addition to healthcare practitioners.
The recommendations include applying Buy Canadian policies to healthcare, adopting international standards for sensitive data sharing, and creating a national market for digital health procurement.
CCI CEO Patrick Searle wrote in the report that more healthcare spending won’t fix the system’s current inefficiencies. “The system needs stronger productivity, better integration, and the ability to deliver care reliably at scale,” Searle said.
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CCI recommends that Canada adopt a healthtech procurement approach similar to its new Defence Industrial Strategy, where Canadian governments aim to build digital health solutions at home first, and partner or buy products only where options can “deepen Canadian capabilities and innovation.”
Many provinces and healthcare authorities follow a lowest-bidder procurement system, rather than a value-based procurement system, when buying software for clinic management or medical devices. CCI’s report argues that Canada should also start assessing interoperability, total cost over the entire lifecycle of a software platform, the cost to switch providers, security, domestic ownership, and control over intellectual property.
Canada’s healthcare system is provincially managed, and procurement processes vary across the country. This sometimes leads to a fragmented system that companies selling digital health tools must navigate, the report argues. Non-profit organization Canada Health Infoway has estimated that greater interoperability—or systems operating in tandem—could unlock $2.4 billion in efficiency gains every year.
CCI’s report suggests allowing healthcare buyers across Canada to “piggyback” off of existing requests for proposals from other jurisdictions. It argues that this would cut down on the need to repeat vetting processes for the same technology.
Another key recommendation was to make it easier to share health data, while preserving patient security and privacy. In much of Canada, the digitization of health records is an ongoing process. A 2024 report by Canada Health Infoways found that more than a third of Canadian physicians said they spent two or more hours each workday beyond what they felt was necessary searching for patient information.
Several of the companies consulted for the CCI report, including AlayaCare and WELL Health Technologies, provide software for patient records. The report argues that Canada could enable more competition by adopting international standards for data portability, such as the HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard—a digital connector for securely sharing electronic health records, currently used in British Columbia and Nova Scotia, but not nationally.
In that same vein, CCI recommended that domestic companies be provided with aggregated, de-personalized health datasets, which it claims that Canadian firms need to effectively build digital healthcare tools. The United Kingdom, for example, has created public health datasets ready for processing by AI systems and with standards for data collection and cleaning.
As healthcare professionals increasingly use AI scribes to record conversations with patients and record sensitive information, some have hailed the tools as helpful time-savers. But experts have also raised concerns about risks surrounding data privacy, accountability, and bias. The Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario recently investigated an incident with an AI transcription software that sent patient information to dozens of unauthorized staff at an Ontario hospital.
CCI’s report, which the organization plans to share directly with governments, argued that Canada must leverage datasets with Canadian information to avoid relying on foreign sources that may not reflect our healthcare system.
Feature image courtesy Well Health.