Every day, Canada’s hospitals generate billions of pieces of health data, from vital signs and prescriptions to physician notes. For Dr. Amol Verma, a physician and scientist at St. Michael’s Hospital and the Temerty Professor of AI Research and Education in Medicine at the University of Toronto, that data is more than records: it’s the key to making health care safer, smarter and more equitable.
Turning Health Data into Health Care
Dr. Verma co-leads GEMINI, a hospital data-sharing network that spans 35 hospitals and covers 60 percent of Ontario’s inpatient care. By securely gathering and analyzing electronic health record data, GEMINI creates a foundation for researchers to study how health care is delivered and where it can be improved.
“Every day, billions of pieces of information are created in the normal process of delivering care,” says Verma. “Our job is to turn that into insights that save lives.”
Artificial intelligence is central to that mission. Verma’s team has developed AI-driven tools that act as early warning systems for hospitalized patients at risk of becoming severely ill with delirium, a condition that impacts one in five people who are admitted to the hospital for a medical or surgical concern.
These tools analyze patient data at the point of care to identify subtle warning signs that might otherwise be missed, allowing clinicians to intervene and prevent delirium. These systems are being deployed in 13 hospitals in one of Canada’s largest clinical trials of artificial intelligence tools. At a larger scale, this technology could change the story for the 500,000 Canadians who experience delirium each year, at a cost of $5 billion to the health care system.
Using AI to Create Health Equity
But for Verma, success is not only about technological innovation; it’s also about fairness and social responsibility. His group is working in partnership with computer scientists, social scientists and people with lived experience of homelessness to design AI tools that can improve care for marginalized populations. By deliberately incorporating equity into their models, they aim to ensure AI reduces, rather than amplifies, existing health disparities.
All of this depends on digital infrastructure. Training and testing AI tools on sensitive hospital data requires secure, high-capacity computing power. Without national-scale infrastructure, researchers are constrained in their ability to build, evaluate and responsibly deploy AI systems.
“We urgently need better infrastructure to test and evaluate these technologies,” Verma says. “This is not about future possibilities – it’s about what patients need today.”
Compute Power to Accelerate Care
A member of the Digital Research Alliance of Canada’s (The Alliance) Researcher Council, Dr. Verma’s work shows how Canada’s health system can become a learning system, where the data generated every day is continuously used to improve care. The Alliance is convening researchers and industry to champion a national, sovereign data platform and scaled up AI compute infrastructure. This digital infrastructure is the backbone of Canadian research and innovation.
His work illustrates the transformative potential of hospital data and AI compute. Without robust, secure, Canadian AI compute, research that could save lives and strengthen our health system risks being slowed, underfunded or dependent on foreign infrastructure where data sovereignty and health equity cannot be guaranteed. With it, Canada can accelerate solutions that improve patient outcomes, reduce health disparities and train the next generation of AI and health leaders.
Public Infrastructure for Public Good
Like roads, railways and hydro, a national data platform and scaled up AI compute infrastructure would unlock vital benefits across health care, industry and society.
Through the Government of Canada’s Sovereign Compute Infrastructure Program, we have a generational opportunity to invest with impact. By ensuring equitable access to scaled-up, public and sovereign AI infrastructure, we can help accelerate life-changing research like Dr. Verma’s—while safeguarding Canadian values, protecting patient data and strengthening Canada’s sovereignty and position in the world.
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