AI has the potential to revolutionize healthcare, offering a once-in-a-generation opportunity to improve the lives of millions of Canadians and people worldwide. When our healthcare system faces mounting pressures—from an aging population to rising costs and increasing demand—adopting advanced technologies is no longer a choice, but a necessity.
As Canada’s leader in accelerating the development and commercialization of digital solutions, DIGITAL is tackling some of the most critical challenges faced by industry and society.
DIGITAL’s collaborations are expanding equitable access through new models of care; offering personalized care for wellness, mental health and chronic conditions; and advancing diagnostics and treatments, including clinical decision support, personalized medicine and drug discovery. These tools are improving patient outcomes, easing burdens on care workers and ensuring the sustainability of our healthcare system. By embracing innovation, we can build a resilient, efficient and future-ready healthcare system.
Examples of DIGITAL’s collaborations to support AI-powered digital health solutions include:
Generating digital twins that accelerate cancer trials
Altis Lab’s computational imaging platform, Nota, is helping to accelerate cancer trials with digital twins; reducing the prohibitive time, cost and failure rate associated with bringing novel, effective anti-cancer drugs to market. By successfully collating the world’s largest cancer imaging database, measuring drug efficacy in clinical trials is done earlier, more accurately and with greater cost-effectiveness that ultimately enable better treatment decisions for individual cancer patients. Global biopharmaceutical companies AstraZeneca and Bayer Pharmaceuticals joined the collaboration to incorporate predictions from the solution into their statistical analyses to quantify treatment effects.
Supporting pressure injury (PI) prevention, early detection, healing and monitoring
Also known as bedsores or pressure sores, PIs affect 26% of patients across Canadian health care settings and degrade quality of life for patients often already experiencing severe illness or debility while requiring costly and long hospitalizations to address. Led by Medtronic Canada, the PressureSmart collaboration will aim to allow clinicians and caregivers in various settings to track when patients will be required to be turned to a new position to prevent PIs. AI-powered camera technology will be used to monitor patients in multiple settings to understand the conditions which make them highly susceptible to PIs, leading to improved strategies for prevention and care.
Enabling the future of genomics and health discoveries
DNAstack’s Omics AI enables a new way of making discoveries by making it possible to train AI models across national and international networks, without moving sensitive health data. This has significant privacy, security, and scalability benefits, and is being used to power global collaborative research in Autism Spectrum Disorder, Parkinson’s disease, ALS, infectious disease and rare disease. For this innovation, DNAstack was named the 2022 World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, 2023 Life Sciences Ontario Company of the Year and 2024 PICCASO Canada Health Privacy Leader.
DIGITAL is helping Canadian companies get ahead of the curve by advancing AI solutions not just in health care, but also natural resources, agriculture, productivity and services.
To learn more about these collaborations and our other work in AI, visit here.
