Where AI is making the biggest impacts in healthcare

Highlights from the e‑Health Conference 2026

HN Summary

• AI is improving healthcare efficiency by reducing physician burnout, streamlining documentation and enhancing patient care through tools such as medical scribes and AI-assisted treatment planning. 

• Healthcare organizations across Canada are using AI to improve system performance, including reducing long-term care wait times, enhancing mental health monitoring and streamlining patient referrals. 

• Speakers emphasized that AI investments must deliver measurable clinical and financial value to help healthcare systems maximize limited resources.

s healthcare leaders from across Canada and abroad gathered in Halifax, Nova Scotia, for the 2026 e-Health Conference, one topic dominated the conversation: the rapidly expanding role of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare.

Throughout the conference, speakers shared compelling examples of how AI is improving efficiency across the healthcare system while emphasizing that successful implementation requires careful planning, evaluation and strategic investment.

During the opening plenary session, three healthcare leaders discussed what they described as the “low-hanging fruit” of AI—solutions that are relatively easy to implement while delivering significant benefits. Among the most promising are AI medical scribes and documentation tools that listen to or analyze patient consultations and automatically generate structured clinical notes, referral letters and treatment plans.

“The evidence is no longer refutable that this is a technology that should be in every clinician’s hands,” said Tej Shah, Managing Director at Accenture.

Shah shared data showing that, at some organizations, AI scribes have reduced physician burnout by 20 per cent while decreasing time spent on documentation by approximately 10 per cent. That additional time, he said, allows clinicians to focus on what matters most—caring for patients.

AI is also transforming patient care in other ways. Dr. Andy Smith, President and CEO of Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, highlighted how AI integrated with radiation therapy systems is reducing the number of treatments many cancer patients require.

“If instead of coming in [for treatment] 30 times, you only have to come five times, that is a profound leap forward in terms of the positive patient experience,” said Smith.

Despite its potential, AI adoption presents challenges. With countless new technologies entering the market, choosing the right solutions can be overwhelming. At the same time, healthcare organizations continue to operate under significant financial pressures and must carefully prioritize investments.

Karen Oldfield, President and CEO of Nova Scotia Health, stressed that return on investment must remain a key consideration.

“The bottom line for any healthcare system is that the benefits of AI also need to deliver monetary value,” she told attendees, noting that every dollar saved through greater efficiency can be reinvested into patient care.

Throughout the remainder of the conference, presenters explored real-world examples demonstrating how AI is improving efficiency while generating measurable savings.

Increasing long-term care capacity in Nova Scotia

During one session, Glenda Keenan, Senior Director of Continuing Care at Nova Scotia Health, described the province’s partnership with Strata Health to implement real-time scheduling software for long-term care beds.

The platform tracks every long-term care bed across Nova Scotia, identifies the types of patients each bed can accommodate and continuously analyzes waitlists to prioritize placements.

Peter Smith, President of Strata Health VitalHub Corp., said the software has significantly improved system capacity.

“You’re literally creating thousands of days of capacity in the system,” said Smith.

Keenan explained that Continuing Care Nova Scotia coordinated more than 3,400 long-term care beds last year. Before implementing the platform, staff managed placements manually using phone calls, fax machines and email.

“We had no line of sight on what was happening at the provincial, local or zone level, so it was imperative that we move forward with a better solution,” she said.

Since introducing the system in 2022, the median time required to fill a vacant bed has dropped from 10.7 days to six days—a 43 per cent improvement. Keenan estimates the economic value of the initiative at approximately $845,000.

She added that the system has improved not only coordination, but also strategic planning by providing better access to data.

“It has supported our ability, as well as the government’s, to make informed decisions because we now have much better insight,” she said.

Real-time mental health monitoring at CAMH

Another presentation highlighted how the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) has implemented Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications to create a centralized operations management system.

David Rotenberg, Chief Analytics Officer and Operations Director at the Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics at CAMH, said the platform enables clinicians to monitor patient progress with unprecedented precision.

“We have dashboards embedded directly into patient charts that show whether people are getting better or not,” he said.

The dashboards support approximately 50 different care pathways, including psychosis, dementia and depression.

“You name it, we have a pathway for it.”

Rotenberg said the real-time insights help clinicians identify when patients require additional support and allow for earlier, more timely interventions.

Reducing wait times and improving patient experience in British Columbia

Natasha Kumari, Growth and Marketing Specialist at Thrive Health, described how her company has helped streamline referral and intake processes for healthcare organizations across British Columbia.

Through interviews and workflow assessments, Thrive identified several common challenges, including incomplete referrals, missing patient information and time-consuming follow-up calls.

“Some of the things we found were that there are a lot of incomplete referrals and information coming into the clinic, which leads to follow-up calls, chasing information and spending valuable appointment time collecting medical history that could have been provided beforehand,” Kumari said.

To address these challenges, Thrive implemented its Thrive Clinical platform at an ENT clinic in British Columbia.

The platform automates much of the information traditionally entered manually. Patients complete their medical history before arriving for their appointment, and the system generates additional questions based on individual responses while automatically sending reminders for incomplete forms.

“Because patients present with different diagnoses and conditions, the system can trigger additional follow-up questions depending on the patient’s responses,” Kumari explained.

Previously, clinicians spent an hour with every new patient simply reviewing medical history. According to Kumari, those sessions have now been virtually eliminated.

The platform also supports patients while they wait for specialist appointments by providing referral updates, personalized recommendations for managing their condition and opportunities to report changes in their health status.

Rather than relying on a static waitlist, Thrive Clinical creates a dynamic triage system that keeps information current for both patients and care providers.

“The idea is to automate the small, manual tasks that take up so much time, provide the right information to the right person at the right time, and help patients move through care faster,” Kumari said.

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