Nov 11, 2025
Can AI and connected data finally unify Canadian healthcare?
8 min read
Summary
- The real issue with Canadian healthcare spending is what we’re spending it on. For every dollar spent on prevention and promotion, Canada spends nearly $12 on hospitals and physicians.1
- This moment is genuinely different. AI, data interoperability, and an engaged consumer are converging in a way that can accelerate transformation.
- We need to reframe health as an economic engine rather than just a budget line item. A healthier workforce is more productive and drives national growth.
- Progress now hinges on coordination. Unifying Canada’s health experience means public and private players shifting care upstream and making better use of the system’s finite capacity.
I had the pleasure of hosting a conversation with two leaders who are shaping Canadian healthcare from different vantage points. Michelle Theroux, National Health Leader at Deloitte Canada, advises governments and large organizations on complex, large-scale transformation. Dave Adams, Executive Vice President of Insurance at Medavie, is working to make care more accessible, preventive, and coordinated for plan members across the country.
Below are the key takeaways from our discussion, but you can revisit the full recording here.
We’re sitting at a unique moment. Healthcare is a top-of-mind issue for Canadians, straining government and employer budgets alike, and it still runs on a system designed decades ago to treat illness, not prevent it. Patients fall through the cracks, data is siloed, and too many Canadians don’t get the care they need until it’s too late.
At the same time, we have new AI capabilities and consumer behaviour patterns that didn’t exist even a few years ago. The gap between what the system does today and what it’s capable of doing is wider than ever.
So the question remains: how can we close this gap and accelerate the transformation from a reactive, fragmented system to one that’s unified, proactive, and drives better health outcomes for Canadians?
Canada’s healthcare spending problem is ultimately a design problem
Canada spent an estimated $399 billion on healthcare in 20252—higher than the OECD average per capita3—and yet we lag behind those same peer nations on outcomes and access.4 The conclusion I keep coming back to is that we’re underspending on prevention and overspending on treating illness.
The numbers bear that out. Hospitals alone represent the largest category of health spending in Canada.1 When the quickest way to get care is through a hospital, an emergency room, or a specialist referral, the system defaults to expensive, late-stage care. Karli Farrow, President & CEO of Trillium Health Partners talked about this crisis recently at a Canadian Club event in Toronto.
Michelle painted a picture in our conversation: Sarah is in her mid-40s, dealing with months of exhaustion, poor sleep, and creeping anxiety. She knows something is off, but like 5.9 million other Canadians, she has no primary care physician.5 So she waits, searches online, and eventually lands in a walk-in clinic. She gets 12 minutes with a provider who doesn’t know her history, and walks out with a referral for a specialist appointment more than 28 weeks out. By the time she’s diagnosed with burnout and early-stage type 2 diabetes, she’s been running at reduced capacity for almost a year.
The system treated the crisis eventually, but never helped Sarah in the earlier moments when she needed it most. Multiply that story across millions of Canadians and we can understand why a majority of healthcare dollars continue flowing toward the most expensive end of the health system. What we need is a redesign of where and how the system shows up for people, so problems get caught earlier and routed to the right care at a far lower cost.
Why this moment is different: AI capabilities meet a shift in consumer behaviour
We’ve been saying Canadian healthcare needs to transform for at least two decades, so some skepticism about “this moment is different” is fair. But three things have changed, and they all came through in our discussion.
- AI has moved from conceptual to useful. New models can predict patients’ needs, guide them to the right care pathway, and reduce administrative burden on the system. At League, we believe these capabilities are moving us toward the promise of an “infinite care team“ in every consumer’s pocket: AI that closes care gaps, helps people manage their chronic conditions, and nudges them toward preventive actions before a crisis happens.
- Increasing health spending every year is becoming clearly unsustainable. Health spending grew 4.2% in 2025 while the economy grew just 2.6%, the second straight year spending growth outpaced economic growth.6 The option to manage that pressure through annual budget increases simply doesn’t exist anymore.
- How people engage in their health has changed. A recent survey found 46% of Canadians used an AI chatbot for medical advice in the past 12 months.7 Instead of waiting for the system to catch up, they’re actively researching symptoms with AI tools, looking for ways to get healthy, and investing more in prevention, making the consumer a payer in the healthcare ecosystem too. Health system change and consumer-driven change are converging now, adding pressure on the system to act fast.
Medavie’s move into primary care is a signal of where this is heading. Dave described the thinking behind it: “We look at the Canadian healthcare landscape and we believe it to be a coordination issue. It’s not just a public system, it’s not just a private system. We need to acknowledge one another and work together.”
Canada's care gaps are real. AI health agents are ready to help.
See why the technology is no longer the barrier and what it will take to deploy it at scale.
Connected data is the foundation of a unified health experience
If the challenge is fundamentally about coordination and proactive care, data is the infrastructure that either makes it possible or prevents it. Right now, it’s mostly preventing it. When a patient’s data is scattered across their benefits portal, pharmacy records, specialists, and primary care provider, nobody has the full picture and the system can only react. It can’t guide people to proactively manage their health at all.
We can’t merge all these parts of the healthcare system, but we can connect them around the patient. The Connected Care Act is starting to raise the bar on what level of interoperability is expected. The technical standards get a lot of attention, but the important signal is that data should follow the patient. As Michelle noted in our conversation, health systems have had strong incentives to hold data rather than share it, and the act starts to reverse those incentives.
When data can flow into primary care, digital tools, and platforms designed around the patient’s journey, we can finally build the kind of proactive, unified care model that Canadians need. Organizations like League and Medavie are already proving the upstream model works: catching people sooner and coordinating their care through one continuous, connected experience is possible today.
Healthcare is an urgent economic investment
Healthcare is more than just a budget line item. There’s a clear connection between our health and well-being and our economic prosperity.
Right now, we’re spending more of our capital on health and getting worse outcomes, when it should work the other way around. A healthier population stays in the workforce longer, contributes more, and reduces the downstream effects of chronic disease, missed workdays, and avoidable acute care.
Reframing health as a driver of national growth is starting to show up in how organizations operate. Medavie has built the idea of a thriving “care economy” into its five-year strategy, treating health spending as innovation to unlock rather than a cost to contain.
The urgency is real. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the system came together, adapted fast, and threw incremental thinking out the window because it had to. With an aging population, growing chronic disease, and a workforce that needs to stay productive, we need to adopt that same mindset now.
Michelle put it clearly: “If we miss this moment, it’s not a missed opportunity. It’s a compounding failure.”
Now is the time to move
Canada has a massive opportunity to get more return from the $399 billion we’re already spending on healthcare. The shift from sick care to well care and preventative care is clear. What excites me most is that we can accelerate this transformation with today’s AI capabilities and more connected data.
Consumers are already voting with their time and dollars to better understand their health. The opportunity is to democratize that for more Canadians, so the very finite time our providers have goes to the most important interactions. That’s the big optimization problem we have to solve in Canadian healthcare.
At League, that’s exactly what we’re doing alongside payers, providers, labs, pharmacy retailers, and partners like Deloitte Canada. And the early results show us this approach works: for a leading Canadian health insurer, deploying a unified digital consumer experience delivered 3X higher engagement and 6X increase in health services adoption.
The conversation with Michelle and Dave reinforced something we at League believe deeply: every Canadian should have access to care that helps them understand their own health data, meets them before they’re in a crisis, and makes it easy to take the next best action for their health. When that happens at scale, the rest of the system starts to work better.
So my question to you and all healthcare leaders: How is your organization showing up for Canadians earlier in their health journey, not just when they reach a crisis?
Sources
- CIHI, Understanding investments in public health, April 2026.
- CIHI, National health expenditure trends, November 2025.
- OECD, Health at a Glance 2025: Canada, November 2025.
- C.D. Howe, Troubling Diagnosis: Comparing Canada’s Healthcare with International Peers, January 2025.
- Canadian Medical Association, 5.9 million adults in Canada still lack regular doctor, December 2025.
- CIHI, NHEX trends, November 2025.
- Liaison Strategies, AI in Health Care: Canadians Using AI, May 2026.
WEBINAR
Watch the full discussion
Hear directly from Michelle Theroux (Deloitte Canada) and Dave Adams (Medavie) on the technology, coordination, and bold thinking needed to build a health system that works for every Canadian.