As Canada continues to advance a more connected healthcare system, nurses play a critical role in shaping how digital health tools, technologies and models of care are designed, adopted and used in practice. From supporting patients across care settings to helping drive innovation and system transformation, the nursing profession brings an essential perspective to the future of Connected Care.  

In this opening keynote, Dr. Leigh Chapman, Chief Nursing Officer of Canada at Health Canada, will share reflections on the evolving role of nursing in Canada's digital health journey. Drawing on her experience as a clinician, leader and advocate, Dr. Chapman will explore how Connected Care can improve patient experiences, support healthcare providers and strengthen the accessibility, quality and sustainability of Canada's healthcare system. She will also discuss the opportunities and considerations that healthcare leaders must address as digital transformation accelerates across the country.  

Primary care is entering a new era of AI enabled transformation. While AI scribes have demonstrated the immediate value of reducing administrative burden, they represent only the first step in a much broader shift toward AI as a productivity platform for the entire primary care visit, one that augments what clinicians can do rather than replacing their judgment. 

This session will explore what that platform looks like in practice, and why success depends as much on workflow integration, avoiding new silos, as on the technology itself. Done well, this can mean more Connected Care for patients, less burnout for clinicians, and a stronger case for choosing to enter and stay in primary care. 

Through a moderated discussion featuring frontline clinicians and health system leaders, attendees will explore the current and potential future state of AI innovation in primary care, the barriers to responsible scaling, and the actions needed to accelerate adoption across Canada's healthcare system, including what it will take to bring emerging areas like clinical decision support closer to broad adoption. 

As AI adoption accelerates across Canada's healthcare system, questions about who governs the data behind it have never mattered more, both for the organizations building these systems and for the policymakers responsible for overseeing them. This session explores what it means to advance AI in healthcare while ensuring data sovereignty, privacy, and national control over critical infrastructure remain central to Canada’s approach. 

Drawing on his experience helping build sovereign digital infrastructure in Canada and abroad, Craig McLellan, founder and CEO of ThinkOn and an international leader in technology innovation and data security, will examine how Canada is balancing AI innovation with these priorities. He will explore the implications of relying on infrastructure outside Canadian jurisdictional control to manage critical health data, the operational and national considerations at stake, and the policy and regulatory decisions that will shape a secure, sovereign and sustainable digital health system. 

The information needed to provide care to cancer patients in British Columbia is fragmented across health organizations and clinical systems, creating barriers to timely, coordinated, and equitable care.  

BC Cancer is partnering with Canada Health Infoway to give cancer care teams across the province improved real-time access to cancer treatment information, a consolidated view of appointments, and up-to-date primary care patient summaries. Leveraging HALO and other pan-Canadian interoperability standards delivered through British Columbia's CareConnect* platform, the partnership will support better-informed clinical decisions, improve continuity and coordination of care, and contribute to Infoway’s national vision for a more connected health system. 

* CareConnect is British Columbia’s secure, view-only Electronic Health Record, providing 150,000 authorized care providers with 24/7 access to patient information. 

Infoway is proud to include the first Partnership Conference Provincial/Territorial Spotlight, a session designed to allow a Canadian jurisdiction to showcase its digital health initiatives, current priorities, and the principles guiding responsible innovation. This year, we welcome Quebec to the stage:

The digital transformation of Quebec’s health and social services is gaining momentum and paving the way for new ways to collaborate, share information, and support providers. This session will showcase initiatives that demonstrate how digital technologies and artificial intelligence can streamline communication, facilitate access to relevant information, and reduce workloads, allowing providers to devote more time to serving clients and patients. However, a responsible approach is needed to prioritize use cases that generate real value, promote the sound stewardship of public resources, and ensure compliance with the province’s rules regarding AI, including privacy, ethics, inclusion, and a proactive approach.

Over the past year, Infoway's pan-Canadian AI Scribe Program introduced AI scribes to thousands of clinicians across Canada, helping reduce documentation burden and giving providers valuable time back in their day. This session will explore how the program was brought to life at scale, what it means for clinicians in their day-to-day practice, and what the evidence shows about its impact. 

Through the perspectives of Edwin White Chacon, Dr. Mark Morris, and Dr. Onil Bhattacharyya, the conversation will connect the ambition behind the program with the realities of clinical practice and the evidence from its 12-month evaluation. Together, they’ll explore how AI scribes are changing the way clinicians work, the experience of delivering care, and what this technology could mean for the future of healthcare in Canada. 

This session features the winning idea from the 2026 Infoway Innovation Pitch Competition, a national competition that challenged graduate students and recent alumni to bring their early-stage digital health innovations to Canada's senior health leadership. The winning presenter will take to the main-stage to share their vision for advancing digital health and Connected Care in Canada, and what it takes to turn an early-stage idea into a solution with national potential.  

The 2026 Infoway Innovation Pitch Competition takes place November 16 at 3:00 PM PST. Join us to watch four finalists compete live before an expert judging panel. 

Across Canada, patients increasingly receive care from multiple providers, organizations and jurisdictions, making health information exchange more important than ever. Much of this work today relies on one-off agreements and bespoke integrations, creating cost and delay. The Connected Care Trust Framework, built with federal, provincial, territorial and Indigenous partners, establishes common governance, legal, and technical trust foundations on top of systems already in place, so information can move securely across settings.  

This panel brings together federal and provincial perspectives on what trusted data exchange unlocks, and how shared foundations support local innovation while preserving jurisdictional autonomy. The discussion will focus on the question ahead: how do we connect what already exists and make it work better together?   

The digital transformation of health systems is creating opportunities for nursing innovation in AI-powered clinical documentation, decision support and mentoring systems, and advanced analytics that enhance the clinician experience and patient outcomes. Realizing that potential requires closing gaps and improving connectivity between fragmented workflows, siloed technologies, and patient and clinician data.  

Nursing has a critical role in ensuring digital transformation delivers meaningful improvements in administrative burden and care delivery, uniting nursing informatics and innovation expertise from frontline nurses, clinical teams, and health system leaders.  

This session explores the opportunities and limitations of current and emerging digital health innovations through a nursing informatics lens. Attendees will gain a deeper understanding of how nursing serves as an essential bridge between technology and patients, improving information flow and enabling safer, more efficient person-centered care.  

This workshop-style session offers a practical, hands-on look at how HALO has moved from health data exchange specification to real-world clinical practice. Using eConsult as the first HALO-enabled application in Ontario, attendees will follow the journey of integrating this workflow into electronic medical records (EMRs), from vendor adoption and testing to conformance, deployment, and lessons learned.   

A live demonstration will showcase HALO in action through a real-world integration between an electronic medical record (EMR) and an eConsult application, complemented by Ontario Health’s perspective on what meaningful integration looks like at the point of care. 

Patient partners bring essential insight into what it is really like to navigate the health system, and where the most meaningful improvements can be made. This session brings together patient voices to share their lived experiences, the lessons they have learned along the way, and what matters most to them in their care. 

Through candid reflections on challenges, successes, and moments of meaningful connection, the panel will explore how centering patient perspectives can help shape a more connected, person-centred health system. 

A shared national standard can sound abstract until it changes what a patient sees, or how a clinician delivers care. This session shows what that could look like in practice, with Prince Edward Island ongoing work towards a standardized Patient Summary as an example of how a national approach can give patients a clearer picture of their health information.  

This standards spotlight will explore the impact of shared standards and the public-private collaboration it takes to turn them into practical, locally driven solutions. Speakers will unpack the implementation roadmap and policy enablers behind this work, and what it can teach other jurisdictions about bringing more Connected Care across Canada. 

How can AI help patients access specialty care faster while reducing administrative burden on healthcare teams? As a recipient of Canada Health Infoway's Centre for Clinical Innovation in Digital Health (CIDH) Innovation Grant, the IBD Centre of British Columbia developed and implemented an AI-powered referral management and triage solution to improve access to digestive health services.  

This session will explore how the platform automates referral intake, analyzes referral information, applies guideline-based triage rules, and creates structured referrals directly within the EMR, along with lessons learned implementing AI into a real-world care setting. It will also highlight results to date, including cutting referral triage time from about five minutes to one minute per referral, improved consistency in prioritization decisions, and streamlined administrative, and discuss opportunities to scale this approach to other clinical programs

Older adults in rural and northern communities face unique challenges, including limited infrastructure and a shortage of local resources. The Centre for Technology Adoption for Aging in the North (CTAAN), an AGE-WELL National Innovation Hub, was built to bridge the technology gap. 

This session will explore how CTAAN partners with technology developers, health authorities, and community organizations to test and implement technologies that support aging in place, from smart home sensors and virtual exercise tools to indoor gardening and emerging AI tools. Attendees will hear how CTAAN ensures these technologies are genuinely usable for the older adults and caregivers who need them most, across home, assisted living, and long-term care settings. The session will highlight examples of successful implementation and what it takes to bring technology from concept to community.

Interoperability across Canada depends on solutions from many vendors, across many jurisdictions, being built to the same specifications and able to work with one another. The Connected Care Conformance Platform supports that work, giving vendors a structured way to test, validate, and demonstrate that their solutions conform to national specifications, from open sandbox testing through to a formal conformance review and listing on the national dashboard.  

This workshop-style session includes a live demonstration of the platform as it works today, with open Q&A throughout, covering what has been tested so far, peer testing at the Pan-Canadian Projectathon, and how the platform is working with jurisdictions on their own requirements. It closes with a look at the roadmap ahead, giving attendees a sense of where the platform is headed and what to expect in the year to come.

For health information to move seamlessly across Canada, it needs to mean the same thing wherever it goes. A common approach to defining, structuring and sharing health data helps ensure information can be understood and used consistently across systems, care teams and communities. 

Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) and Canada Health Infoway are working together to make this possible through the Canadian Core Data for Interoperability (CACDI) and the CA Core+ respectively, two complementary standards helping build the foundations for more connected care across Canada. 

This session will explore the importance of designing CACDI and CA Core+ for practical implementation, the guidance and support needed to encourage adoption across jurisdictions and vendors, and how these shared standards support Canada’s broader interoperability ambitions. 

The National Health Information Sharing Agreement (NHISA) is a shared legal and governance framework designed to support trusted health information exchange and is a foundational component of the Connected Care Trust Framework. 

This session will explore the practical use and deployment of NHISA to support implementation of the Virtual Health Hub's ClinicianViewer™ project, while respecting Indigenous data sovereignty and community governance. 

Attendees will learn how NHISA is being applied in practice, how community expectations and decision-making are reflected, and how a shared legal foundation can reduce reliance on one-off arrangements. 

Leaders from the Digital Health Interoperability Task Force (DHITF) will share an early look at their work to define what community-based clinicians need to safely and seamlessly access and exchange health information across Canada's healthcare system.  

Through a presentation and moderated discussion with the Task Force's co-chairs, the session will explore the systemic factors, from governance to fragmentation, that limit clinician participation in interoperability, and what it will take to address them.  

The session will also preview the direction of the Task Force's forthcoming national playbook, expected in June 2027, which will outline a practical pathway to enable broader clinician participation in Connected Care across Canada. 

Join Canada Health Infoway’s Vendor Innovation Program (VIP) team for a look at how investment in local innovation can deliver meaningful benefits for clinicians, patients, and communities. The session will open with an overview of the VIP, highlighting key outcomes from the 2025 cohort of vendor-led demonstration projects, including how projects advanced vendor-healthcare partner collaboration and evidence for scaling. 

This session will also feature a care provider from Okaki Health Intelligence, sharing firsthand experiences with CliniQuill, a VIP-supported AI-enabled clinical documentation solution built for First Nations home care. Attendees will learn how the project has reduced documentation burden, created more time for providers to focus on patients and community needs, and continues to grow and scale across First Nations communities. 

Healthcare students are learning to work alongside AI before they ever set foot in a real clinical setting, and this workshop offers a firsthand look at how. Attendees will get a guided walkthrough of a unique, non-commercial, Canadian academic EHR sandbox environment for healthcare students, developed by the Association of Faculties of Pharmacy of Canada, with support from Canada Health Infoway and other partners.

The session will feature a live demonstration of the recent, novel development of a simulated ambient AI scribe within this learning environment, showing how educators can introduce students to AI powered tools in a safe, controlled setting that includes clinical case-based experiences and evaluation. Attendees will have the opportunity to ask questions throughout, making this an interactive look at how healthcare education is preparing for an AI enabled future.

As Connected Care scales across Canada, how data is collected, governed, accessed, and used plays a critical role in building trust, advancing equity, and strengthening relationships with the communities it serves.  

In this keynote, Dr. Jacqueline Quinless, an award-winning public sociologist with more than two decades of experience in community-based research and data governance, explores what meaningful data sovereignty and allyship look like in practice. She will examine Indigenous data sovereignty, the First Nations principles of OCAP® (ownership, control, access, and possession), and community-led data governance, along with artificial intelligence and emerging forms of digital colonialism.   

Attendees will gain a deeper understanding of how to build partnerships grounded in trust, reciprocity, and accountability, so Indigenous communities actively shape how data and digital technologies are designed and governed in Connected Care.