In June, Prime Minister Mark Carney launched Canada’s National Artificial Intelligence Strategy: AI for All, with healthcare as its centerpiece. The five-year strategy formally recognizes the significant opportunity to improve health outcomes by putting AI to work in diagnostics, patient care, and system efficiency. The strategy is ambitious and important. Bringing it to life will take a true team effort across the public and private sectors.
The opportunities are top of mind for us at OnX. We have long supported healthcare organizations, and this year we are doubling down on our focus on Canadian hospitals.
If you attended the Public Sector Network Digital Leadership Day in Toronto in April, you may have seen my colleagues Jenya Doudareva, PhD, and Jeff Lamb join Damian Jankowicz, PhD, EVP & Chief Information and AI Officer at Unity Health, on stage for a discussion about what it truly takes to operationalize AI in healthcare.
That event gave us a chance to meet and hear from dozens of healthcare leaders. With this blog — the first in a series — we aim to keep the conversations going.
As OnX increases our focus and investment in healthcare, we do so with tremendous respect and empathy for the clinical, technology, and other leaders who keep Canadian hospitals running smoothly. We’re also supportive of healthcare’s goal: helping people live longer and better.
Given our more than 40-year track record as a leader in Canadian IT services, we have confidence in our expertise in AI, data, and technology. Yet we recognize how much there is to learn about healthcare, and we know each institution operates with a unique set of challenges and constraints.
One of our most valued teachers is Mark Farrow, whose tenure as a healthcare IT leader rivals ours in IT services. Mark has walked in the shoes of a hospital CIO and has made clear what OnX should not do: explain everything a hospital CIO is doing wrong and offer a single product as the “answer” to it all. Instead, we’re following the approach that helped us build trust and credibility and, ultimately, create better outcomes with our clients in Canadian public safety.
The approach is simple: Bring questions and a set of tools rather than a fixed idea of which solution you need. Activate our eyes and ears, so we can understand which tools might be right for the job. And show up knowing that big-bang transformations are seldom feasible in organizations that deliver around-the-clock patient care; after all, you can’t shut down an emergency department for a tech turn. What we’re hearing is that smaller, targeted improvements are the path to sustainable progress.
Over the next few posts, we’re going to think out loud with you about those kinds of improvements across the operational side of healthcare. We will explore opportunities that are practical, Canada specific, and budget conscious. And we’ll keep each blog post short enough to read between fire drills.
For the next couple of posts, I’m handing the proverbial pen to Mark for his candid observations and well-calibrated instincts for vendor nonsense. (Those are just two of the reasons we asked him to work with us as we find our footing!) In the next post, Mark takes on the belief that the hospital front door is “random” and therefore impossible to predict. (Spoiler alert: He doesn’t buy that.)
In November, OnX will be at the Canada East Healthcare Innovation Summit 2026 in Montreal, hosted by Bamberg Health. We would love to continue these discussions in person, on your terms. Tell us where we’re wrong. Share how your hardest week this year looked. We’re all ears.