HealthcarePapers最新文献

In 2015, the Advisory Panel on Healthcare Innovation (APHI) highlighted shortcomings in Canada's healthcare systems, including weak integration, ineffective workforce planning and deployment, uneven infostructure and misaligned incentives. Progress in the last decade has been modest, underscoring both the challenges faced by provinces/territories in effecting top-down structural reforms and the limited yield from federal attempts to "buy change." APHI anticipated that outcome and argued for a new bottom-up model of collaborative catalysis, evaluation and scaling of effective innovations in healthcare. This model also facilitates the selective commercialization of novel Canadian goods and services and bears consideration given our healthcare crisis and weak innovation indices.

It has been 10 years since the Advisory Panel on Healthcare Innovation Report (Advisory Panel on Healthcare Innovation 2015) recommended patient engagement and empowerment as one action to enhance the quality and sustainability of healthcare in Canada. Since that time, patient engagement has become internationally recognized as a key component toward improving healthcare systems. In this article, the author highlights how organizations across Canada have engaged patients in healthcare and health research planning, design and governance activities, and discusses three key areas wherein improvements are needed to leverage the potential of patient engagement: leadership and infrastructure, diversity and representation and power structures/imbalances.

Federal Health Minister Rona Ambrose created the Advisory Panel on Healthcare Innovation, asking them to identify five priority innovation areas that would improve accessibility, quality of care and health spending. Their 2015 report found fragmented systems, a lack of collaboration across jurisdictions to share learnings and best practices and undercapitalized technological advancements, among other barriers to spreading successful innovation. Ten years later, we review the report's main recommendations and examine progress in the key areas identified for action. Progress on many of the recommendations is lacking. The panel's main recommendations - creation of a $1-billion innovation fund to enable sustainable changes in care delivery and a national healthcare innovation agency - have gone largely unanswered. We illustrate the need for an innovation agency that spans all provinces using several examples, including ones where digital health innovation is required, including central intake and triage for specialist referrals. We discuss the conditions needed for successful implementation: An interoperable digital solution, changes to models of care and funding flows, leadership and a patient-centred culture within the health system. We also highlight how local innovation hubs enable the development of new technologies and identify the key local, provincial and national factors for success that should be considered for a new federal agency.

Health systems in developed countries face escalating challenges, including rising costs, workforce crises, safety concerns and persistent inequities. Despite widespread recognition of the need for transformation, progress has been slow and fragmented. The Canadian experience underscores this reality: a decade after the federal health minister's Advisory Panel on Healthcare Innovation released its landmark report, many of its key recommendations - including a $1-billion innovation fund and a national healthcare innovation agency - remain unfulfilled. During this period, system pressures have intensified, compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic and growing financial constraints. At the same time, digital technologies, particularly artificial intelligence, offer unprecedented opportunities to redesign care delivery, though adoption has been patchy and uncoordinated. This commentary argues that health systems must embed innovation into their core mission, linking transformation with economic development through clinician- and patient-driven solutions, commercialization, procurement reform and sustained national strategies to ensure that healthcare becomes both sustainable and socially generative.

Ten years after the Advisory Panel on Healthcare Innovation's report, progress on its recommendations remains limited across Canada. Coordinated, patient-centred, digitally enabled reforms and stronger interjurisdictional collaboration are urgently needed.

In 2023, federal, provincial and territorial governments created Health Workforce Canada with a mandate to transform health workforce planning. Strategic initiatives focus on convening networks, advancing data, catalyzing modelling and forecasting and sharing promising practices. Early successes feature extensive collaboration and co-creation, data dashboards to assist planners and decision makers, an early microsimulation modelling tool to enable working with imprecise data and an artificial intelligence-powered Digital Front Door to enhance access to quality health workforce information and support informed decision making. Early efforts are having a positive impact on health workforce planning, data accessibility and catalyzing innovation and transformation.

Canada lags its peers in health systems innovation. Ten years after the federal Advisory Panel on Healthcare Innovation released its report, progress remains limited. In this issue, Manns et al. (2025) revisit the recommendations of the report, assess progress and propose a path forward, including establishing a well-funded innovation agency, advancing interoperable data systems, shifting to value-based funding and fostering patient engagement. The lead essay (Manns et al. 2025), along with the rich and insightful commentaries, highlight both systemic barriers and opportunities for change. Despite past inertia, these strategies offer hope for building an innovation-ready health system capable of meeting future challenges.

Canada has a history of innovative pilot projects that have failed to spread and scale to achieve transformative change in the organization and delivery of healthcare. Past experience suggests four essential dimensions of sustainability: funding, including incentives to adopt new working methods and longer-term program funding; strong policy guidance and/or legislation and regulation; sustained focus on addressing a particular problem or issue; and accountability for results. Had the Naylor Panel recommendations been implemented a decade ago, Canada's healthcare system would now be on a much stronger footing to confront today's challenges. The Naylor blueprint offers pertinent, practical solutions for issues such as improving access to primary care, improving digital health and contending with artificial intelligence.

According to Manns et al. (2025), Canada struggles to turn good ideas into routine care because functions for evidence, funding, procurement and delivery are fragmented. In the UK, these functions are, in part, connected within a tax-funded service free at the point of use. This commentary maps the architecture, linking research translation, independent assessment, regulation, procurement, adoption support and data and explains how evidence moves into practice through principles aligned with the nonadoption, abandonment, scale-up, spread and sustainability framework, which addresses nonadoption, abandonment, the challenges of scale-up, spread and sustainability. Two worked examples, placental growth factor testing and stroke imaging artificial intelligence, show that national assessment, adoption support and procurement enabled rapid adoption at a national scale. Practical implications for Canada include a single repeatable pathway from promising evidence to routine use, conditional adoption with evidence generation, national frameworks that reduce transaction costs, investment in implementation capability and secure data environments for real-world evaluation.

Progress on the report of the Advisory Panel on Healthcare Innovation (2015) for Canada is limited. While Manns et al. (2025) advocate for a national innovation agency and fund, their analysis underemphasizes the catalytic role of health data infrastructure as the foundation of an innovation engine. Consequently, Canada has not cultivated the strategic infrastructure necessary to enable spread and scale. This commentary argues that pan-Canadian health data ecosystems are foundational to scaling innovation. By prioritizing data liquidity, real-world evidence generation and data stewardship, Canada can transform its "perpetual pilot projects" into a learning health system that accelerates the scale and spread of value-based innovations.