Few things define Canada more clearly than its healthcare system. Long a source of national pride, it rests on a simple but powerful promise: that care should be determined by need, not the size of a patient's wallet.
But the system built to uphold that promise is struggling to keep pace with today’s needs, constrained by a model created for a different era, and a different kind of patient. Designed primarily to treat acute illness in medical facilities, Canada’s healthcare system largely assumes that patients arrive with a problem that can be diagnosed and resolved in days.
Increasingly, though, that’s not the patient walking through the door. Today’s patients are older and more likely to live with multiple chronic conditions, the kind that no single hospital stay can fix.
And the pressure is only set to grow.
By 2030, roughly one in five Canadians will be 65 or older. Seniors already account for 47 per cent of healthcare spending, while more than five million Canadians are managing two or more chronic conditions.
The instinctive response is to build more: more hospitals, more beds, and more facilities. But a new policy brief from Ivey Business School’s Lawrence National Centre for Policy and Management argues that more of the same is not the prescription Canada needs. It contends that a system-level shift is required to integrate connected care into the existing healthcare infrastructure.
Care beyond the hospital bed
What if we stopped organizing healthcare less around healthcare institutions and more around patients’ needs? That’s the thinking behind connected care.
Rather than relying on a single facility or program to meet a patient’s needs, connected care brings together services and technologies to provide more continuous support, wherever it’s needed.
Consider a 72-year-old woman managing diabetes, early-stage heart disease, and the lingering effects of a fall.
Under today’s system, she navigates and travels to a patchwork of independent specialists, pharmacies, and follow-up appointments largely on her own. Connected care aims to better link providers and services and extend her support beyond healthcare facilities, including into her home, so care is more continuous and coordinated.
That support might include remote monitoring, virtual appointments, digital tools, and AI-enabled systems to help her care team track her health, spot emerging problems, intervene earlier, and reduce visits to medical facilities.
That doesn’t make hospitals any less essential. It changes how they fit into a patient’s broader healthcare journey.
“The goal of connected care is not to replace episodic healthcare,” said Romel Mostafa, Director of the Lawrence Centre and the report’s academic lead. “It is to complement it with care that is more continuous, proactive, and capable of supporting people where they live.”
It’s a compelling vision. But can it work in practice?
Early pilots suggest it can.
The innovations are here. So, what’s holding us back?
Across the globe, connected care is already being put to the test.
The report highlights four examples: Toronto Grace Health Centre’s Remote Care Monitoring program, University Health Network’s Medly digital therapeutic, TELUS Health’s Home Health Monitoring, and Medoma’s hospital-at-home model in Sweden.
Though different in approach, each offers promising evidence of what connected care can achieve. Toronto Grace, for instance, saw fewer readmissions and safer transitions home for seniors, showing how remote monitoring can help older adults remain at home while reducing costs compared with hospital-based care.
“For patients managing chronic conditions, care shouldn’t end when they leave the hospital,” adds Mariya Tsybulnyk, MBA ’24, co-author of the policy brief. “Ongoing monitoring can help providers identify changes in a patient’s health, respond to emerging concerns, and coordinate support across care settings, improving the quality of care.”
And new medical innovations, like Toronto Grace’s, aren’t isolated pilot successes.
Canada is actively developing new approaches to healthcare, even if many remain outside the public spotlight. The challenge is getting these models beyond the pilot stage. Funding systems built around episodic, hospital-based care; differences in regional requirements; and entrenched ways of delivering healthcare can all make it difficult to expand successful programs.
The challenge, therefore, isn’t a lack of innovation. It’s a system that isn’t built to bring these solutions to more patients.
Four pillars for a more connected system
If individual innovations alone can't deliver connected care, then the system itself needs the right foundations – from digital infrastructure and funding to workforce planning and equitable access. The report outlines four pillars to guide that shift.
1. Connect the entire system
Connected care depends on information moving seamlessly between patients, providers, and care settings. Common standards, compatible systems, and clear governance can help innovations work across organizations, rather than remain isolated pilots. More flexible regulations and faster procurement would also help promising technologies move from testing to wider use.
2. Fund the patient journey
When care shifts between hospitals, home care, and other providers, costs can move with it. Funding models need to support the patient’s journey across the system, rather than reward individual organizations in isolation. Success should be measured through health outcomes, overall costs, and operational efficiency.
3. Prepare the workforce for hybrid care
Digital tools don’t replace healthcare professionals. They change how and where care is delivered. Scaling connected care will require digital-health skills, new care roles, and practical ways to integrate technology into the work of nurses, allied health professionals, and other providers.
4. Make equity part of the design
Connected care could extend access to specialist services for underserved communities, but technology alone won’t close gaps in care. Internet access, language, digital literacy, and geography all affect who can benefit. These barriers need to be addressed from the outset.
Together, the four pillars offer a 360-degree framework for moving connected care from initial assessment to pilot projects, evaluation and, ultimately, wider adoption.
But even with the right foundations in place, one challenge remains: building the right evidence. That’s where the framework’s final element comes in.
The chicken, the egg, and the case for change
Like any promising business innovation, for connected care to successfully move beyond pilots, healthcare leaders need proof that it works – and that that the benefits justify the investment. Yet gathering that evidence often requires testing new approaches at scale and across multiple institutions.
It’s a chicken-and-egg problem: the system wants proof before it invests, but proving what works requires investment.
To break the cycle, the report proposes a connected-care policy sandbox.
A structured way of testing new ideas, the sandbox would enable provinces and territories to collaboratively test new models while gathering comparable evidence on clinical outcomes, costs, implementation, patient and provider experience, and equity.
And in Mostafa’s view, the sandbox is the kind of intervention that can't wait.
He said: “We need to be thoughtful about how we change healthcare. New approaches must be tested rigorously, and decisions must be grounded in evidence. But we can’t let the need for proof become a reason for inaction. Canada can no longer afford to wait for the perfect technology or the perfect system to start making progress.”
That progress matters. Not only for the future of healthcare, but for the country as a whole.
As Canada’s population changes and demand grows, its healthcare system must evolve to keep pace. The report’s framework offers a path to do just that, helping promising innovations reach more patients and ensuring a system Canadians have long been proud of can continue to serve them for generations to come.
To explore what connected care could mean for the future of Canadian healthcare, read the Lawrence National Centre's full policy brief, Transforming Senior Healthcare in Canada: Embracing Connected Care, AI, and Digital Innovation, by Mariya Tsybulnyk, MBA ’24 and Renee Hueston, MBA ’24, under the guidance of Romel Mostafa, Director of the Lawrence National Centre for Policy and Management, and Zsofia Agoston Villalba, Policy and Communications Specialist.
