HealthcarePapersPub Date : 2025-04-01DOI: 10.12927/hcpap.2025.27567
Dominique Cava, Brianne Wood
{"title":"Workforce Investments to Accelerate Learning Health Systems With Artificial Intelligence in Northern and Rural Settings.","authors":"Dominique Cava, Brianne Wood","doi":"10.12927/hcpap.2025.27567","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.12927/hcpap.2025.27567","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Northern and rural health systems experience unique challenges and opportunities for adopting artificial intelligence (AI). An embedded AI researcher could help these systems capitalize on existing strengths to better consider AI use. This professional would collect and manage meaningful health data; bridge the gap between the health workforce and AI tools; and ensure that these tools are adapted to the specific social, economic and cultural needs in the region. Critical research and use of AI tools could advance northern and rural learning health systems to achieve better outcomes while contributing to the global AI agenda.</p>","PeriodicalId":101342,"journal":{"name":"HealthcarePapers","volume":"22 4","pages":"69-73"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144103403","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
HealthcarePapersPub Date : 2025-04-01DOI: 10.12927/hcpap.2025.27574
Jacqueline K Kueper, Jay A Pandit
{"title":"Artificial Intelligence for Healthcare in Canada: Contrasting Advances and Challenges.","authors":"Jacqueline K Kueper, Jay A Pandit","doi":"10.12927/hcpap.2025.27574","DOIUrl":"10.12927/hcpap.2025.27574","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled tools are transforming healthcare, offering potential benefits such as alleviating administrative burdens, optimizing workflows and supporting diagnostics and personalized treatment for improved patient outcomes. With the increasing availability of AI-enabled tools, it is important to consider the potential for both benefit and harm and what is needed to support generalizable and beneficial, equitable progress. This paper provides a brief history of AI advancements leading to the current state in Canada, reviews trends in applications and research, and discusses the balancing act between achieving positive and negative outcomes. Woven throughout are high-level overviews of concepts and references to key initiatives, regulations and guidelines relevant to the Canadian context as well as more in-depth, contrasting examples to highlight how the apparent explosion of AI is happening at varied paces across applications, specialties and regions. The piece includes system- and population-level perspectives on suspected future implications and needs as the number and type of AI-enabled tools used in healthcare increases.</p>","PeriodicalId":101342,"journal":{"name":"HealthcarePapers","volume":"22 4","pages":"11-30"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144103454","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
HealthcarePapersPub Date : 2025-04-01DOI: 10.12927/hcpap.2025.27568
Onil Bhattacharyya, Payal Agarwal, Emily Ha, Jean Yong, Enid Montague
{"title":"Accelerating AI Adoption for Reducing Administrative Burden in Primary Care: Insights from Evaluating AI Scribes.","authors":"Onil Bhattacharyya, Payal Agarwal, Emily Ha, Jean Yong, Enid Montague","doi":"10.12927/hcpap.2025.27568","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.12927/hcpap.2025.27568","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Artificial intelligence (AI) adoption has progressed unevenly across healthcare disciplines, even for low-risk applications aimed at easing administrative burdens. This commentary examines AI scribes as valuable tools to reduce administrative workload and improve provider well-being. A two-phase evaluation demonstrated significant reductions in documentation time and positive provider feedback, prompting provincial procurement. Highlighting the need for tailored, inclusive evaluations, we propose a structured approach to support broader AI adoption in primary care, focusing on fit-for-purpose assessments, robust simulations and diverse partnerships. This approach aims to foster equitable AI deployment across primary care settings in Canada, improving access and quality of care.</p>","PeriodicalId":101342,"journal":{"name":"HealthcarePapers","volume":"22 4","pages":"63-68"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144103388","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
HealthcarePapersPub Date : 2025-04-01DOI: 10.12927/hcpap.2025.27572
Brian D Hodges
{"title":"Education and the Adoption of AI in Healthcare: \"What Is Happening?\"","authors":"Brian D Hodges","doi":"10.12927/hcpap.2025.27572","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.12927/hcpap.2025.27572","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Kueper and Pandit (2025) describe potential benefits and harms of technologies that incorporate artificial intelligence (AI), including bias and equity issues, effects on end-users and downstream impacts on quality of care and cost. They advocate for an iterative, life cycle approach in developing and monitoring \"trustworthy\" AI. Their model suggests that safe and effective deployment of AI requires \"training\" for end-users but leave ill-defined what such training might entail. The design of learning programs to facilitate safe incorporation of AI into healthcare must be proactive and deliberate and not an afterthought.</p>","PeriodicalId":101342,"journal":{"name":"HealthcarePapers","volume":"22 4","pages":"39-43"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144103457","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
HealthcarePapersPub Date : 2025-04-01DOI: 10.12927/hcpap.2025.27571
Sian Hsiang-Te Tsuei
{"title":"How Are Canadians Regulating Artificial Intelligence for Healthcare? A Brief Analysis of the Current Legal Directions, Challenges and Deficiencies.","authors":"Sian Hsiang-Te Tsuei","doi":"10.12927/hcpap.2025.27571","DOIUrl":"10.12927/hcpap.2025.27571","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Effective regulations can ensure a minimum level of performance from artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Canadian regulators face two major categories of challenges. First, the AI-specific challenges stem from the unpredictable developments, use, evidence, and acceptable ethical trade-offs around AI systems. These uncertainties can drive the need for flexible definitions of risk, evidentiary threshold, change plan, and post hoc determination of ethical trade-off. These regulatory flexibilities could neglect impactful AI systems, allow regulatory capture, and undermine public oversight. Second, the jurisdictional challenges obfuscate the scope of products, regulatory boundaries, and division of power across regulations. Clarifying regulatory definitions, the responsibilities of professional bodies, and the need for provincial and territorial legislations may help. However, the lack of reason to believe that regulators have clear motivation and capacity to meaningfully protect patient health is worrisome.</p>","PeriodicalId":101342,"journal":{"name":"HealthcarePapers","volume":"22 4","pages":"44-51"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144103459","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
HealthcarePapersPub Date : 2025-04-01DOI: 10.12927/hcpap.2025.27575
Ashley Chisholm, Owen Adams, Sara Allin, Audrey Laporte
{"title":"What Problem Are We Trying to Solve With Artificial Intelligence for Healthcare in Canada?","authors":"Ashley Chisholm, Owen Adams, Sara Allin, Audrey Laporte","doi":"10.12927/hcpap.2025.27575","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.12927/hcpap.2025.27575","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The application of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare is not a \"flash in the pan.\" As Howell et al. (2024) have described, AI has been evolving since the 1950s, from decision trees to machine learning to generative AI that can create new content. These developments were foreshadowed by science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in a story first published in 1942 in which he outlined three rules of robotics, to the effect that they must not harm humans (Asimov 1950). Fast forward to 2015; Ashrafian (2015) proposed an additional law for AI systems that interact with each other: \"all robots endowed with comparable human reason and conscience should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.\"</p>","PeriodicalId":101342,"journal":{"name":"HealthcarePapers","volume":"22 4","pages":"5-9"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144103471","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
HealthcarePapersPub Date : 2025-04-01DOI: 10.12927/hcpap.2025.27569
Alison P Paprica
{"title":"Training Data Tell Us a Lot About Whom Health AI Tools Are Likely to Benefit.","authors":"Alison P Paprica","doi":"10.12927/hcpap.2025.27569","DOIUrl":"10.12927/hcpap.2025.27569","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Appropriate training data are a prerequisite for health AI tools. Policy makers, clinicians and patients can assess the datasets used to train AI models as a practical step in determining whom health AI tools are likely to benefit. Analyses of training datasets can help prioritize which health AI tools to validate and help identify where changes are needed to improve the equity of health AI.</p>","PeriodicalId":101342,"journal":{"name":"HealthcarePapers","volume":"22 4","pages":"58-62"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144103466","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
HealthcarePapersPub Date : 2025-04-01DOI: 10.12927/hcpap.2025.27570
Stephanie Garies, Jessalyn K Holodinsky, Jason E Black, Tyler Williamson
{"title":"Achieving Health Equity for All Canadians: Is AI Currently Up to the Task?","authors":"Stephanie Garies, Jessalyn K Holodinsky, Jason E Black, Tyler Williamson","doi":"10.12927/hcpap.2025.27570","DOIUrl":"10.12927/hcpap.2025.27570","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Artificial intelligence (AI) deployed into healthcare settings is touted as an exciting approach for improving health equity. However, several issues need to be addressed before this could be achieved, including improving the collection and use of the social determinants of health data, enhancing data interoperability, closing the digital divide and conducting rigorous assessment and evaluation of AI applications to ensure that they achieve fair and equitable outcomes in real-world settings. Importantly, we should not neglect evidence-based strategies that will truly advance health equity, such as adequate housing, poverty reduction, accessible mental healthcare, food security and many other structural and social determinants of health.</p>","PeriodicalId":101342,"journal":{"name":"HealthcarePapers","volume":"22 4","pages":"52-57"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144103452","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
HealthcarePapersPub Date : 2025-04-01DOI: 10.12927/hcpap.2025.27565
Jacqueline K Kueper, Jay A Pandit
{"title":"Artificial Intelligence in the Canadian Healthcare System: Scaling From Novelty to Utility.","authors":"Jacqueline K Kueper, Jay A Pandit","doi":"10.12927/hcpap.2025.27565","DOIUrl":"10.12927/hcpap.2025.27565","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The series of papers in this issue discusses artificial intelligence (AI) for healthcare in Canada, including key milestones and efforts, current trends and future needs for Canada to progress from being a leader in AI development to responsible and ethical AI adoption that advances the quintuple aim. Three key discussion themes to support this bridge include: datasets, generalizability and equity; efficiency and evaluation; and focusing on the system rather than the product. Partnerships and interdisciplinary teamwork are essential, and the commentaries highlight perspectives from patients, providers and educators. AI for healthcare poses immense potential for both benefit and harm, and Canada has the essential building blocks and shared values to start pushing the balance toward benefit and improve health and well-being across its diverse geography and populations.</p>","PeriodicalId":101342,"journal":{"name":"HealthcarePapers","volume":"22 4","pages":"79-83"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144103456","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
HealthcarePapersPub Date : 2025-01-01DOI: 10.12927/hcpap.2025.27559
Colleen M Flood, Bryan Thomas
{"title":"Medicare Makeover: A Response to Peer Commentaries.","authors":"Colleen M Flood, Bryan Thomas","doi":"10.12927/hcpap.2025.27559","DOIUrl":"10.12927/hcpap.2025.27559","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In responding to the <i>Canada Health Act</i> reforms proposed in Medicare Makeover, our peers provide valuable insights and suggestions. We appreciate, for instance, underscoring complexities inherent in implementing our call for evidence-based processes to define publicly-funded services and concerns regarding variation in accessibility and coverage standards across Canada. While some responses advocate for greater federal direction, we argue that fractured accountabilities have contributed to current challenges. It is essential that reforms establish a clear line of accountability: the federal government must ensure provinces, territories and Indigenous governments implement transparent processes to set standards for reasonable access and coverage and, in turn, provincial, territorial and Indigenous governments must be accountable for delivering on those standards to their voters.</p>","PeriodicalId":101342,"journal":{"name":"HealthcarePapers","volume":"22 3","pages":"69-73"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143675150","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}