Globally, healthcare is being disrupted, akin to the disruption we witnessed in media and transportation, and digital health is leading the charge. While Canada lags its peers in health outcomes and health system performance, Alberta’s areas of strength – artificial intelligence, Internet of Things and immersive technologies – can be leveraged to improve health outcomes and position our province as a leader in the global health economy.
Health Cities, a not-for-profit organization in Edmonton, makes it their mission to improve the health of all Canadians by supporting and delivering scalable healthcare solutions to grow the health sector nationally.
By leveraging talent, technology platforms and institutional assets (like health data), Health Cities builds on our province’s strengths to improve healthcare outcomes, address current healthcare delivery challenges, and accelerate a knowledge-based sector which will significantly contribute to job growth in the region. In particular, Health Cities’ work around safe health data points to an untapped resource which has the potential to drive the sector forward.
Since its establishment in 2018, Health Cities continues to bridge gaps in the healthcare system, filling them with companies’ innovative solutions and through initiatives that provide better access and delivery, creating pathways for locally developed innovations to market. By creating environments for innovators to test, try and validate their solutions, Health Cities helps de-risk companies and accelerate these solutions. Health Cities collaborates with clinicians, innovators, philanthropic organizations, industry, and academia to address key health challenges, including care access and equity. As a trusted third party, they identify what innovators can bring to the table, including relationships, expertise, global reach, investment, or policy influence.
Through their initiatives, Health Cities demonstrates their model for creating pathways for care that innovators can plug in to, while
addressing the needs that exist in the community.
One successful initiative is the deployment of Home Health Monitoring (HHM) in 13 different Primary Care Networks (PCNs) across Central Alberta. This deployment demonstrated the viability of this pathway, allowing for further testing capacity to be built within PCNs to enable more regional small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to showcase and test their solutions in live clinical settings. Health Cities also successfully deployed a remote-based diagnostics imaging initiative with WestView and Red Deer PCNs (and Alberta technology partner Medo, now operating as Exo).
Currently, Health Cities is partnering with The Brenda Strafford Foundation (BSF) on the HealthTech Home, a vendor-agnostic “sand-box” for Alberta SMEs to test, try, and validate technology that enables older adults to age in their home comfortably and safely. The interest garnered for the HealthTech Home includes health delivery organizations, academia, and industry. It is expected that many additional opportunities will stem from this initiative, allowing for more companies to plug in their innovations in homecare and autonomous living.
Health Cities continues to evolve and adapt based on our healthcare systems and the emergence of new technologies, always with a focus on models of care.
“It is through pathways like HHM and by creating relationships and environments for change in key areas, that we can truly transform health, improve health outcomes and grow our economy.”
– Reg Joseph, CEO, Health Cities
