Providence Health Care in Vancouver will direct a $48 million federal Strategic Response Fund  investment to further develop its Clinical Support and Research Centre, an under-construction emergent technology hub connected to St. Paul’s Hospital.

This announcement highlights the growing commitment among Canadian Catholic health-care institutions to integrate artificial intelligence, robotics and other paradigm-shifting innovations to enhance patient care and streamline administrative functions.

Brian Simmers, the chief financial officer and vice president of health informatics at Providence Healthcare, shed light on a particular objective that will be advanced thanks to the infusion of capital.

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“Part of that $48 million is to digitize a bunch of our data assets, like biospecimens, and also to access our digital pathology with the hope and purpose of helping researchers and clinicians develop AI algorithms that could be turned into treatments or patentable products,” said Simmers.

Unity Health Toronto, a network with St. Joseph’s Health Centre, St. Michael’s Hospital and Providence Healthcare under its banner, is also dedicated to this trajectory. It has a Data Science and Advanced Analytics team dedicated to creating AI and other machine learning solutions for pressing health-care problems.

In January, Unity Health Toronto was awarded with robust Stage 6 validations — Stage 7 is the top tier — from Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society on the Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model (EMRAM) and the Analytics Maturity Assessment Model (AMAM). The EMRAM evaluates how well a hospital uses electronic medical records to support patients and clinicians, and the AMAM examines analytics and data governance.

“This achievement demonstrates how Unity Health is using digital tools to make care more connected, transparent and data-driven,” says Altaf Stationwala, the president and CEO of Unity Health. “Through our new patient portal, MyChart, powered by Epic, patients and families can access information about their care, while behind the scenes our teams are using data and analytics to support quality improvement, strengthen safety and guide operational decisions that benefit both patients and staff.”          

Stationwala added that patient information contained in MyChart has reduced more than 7,000 unneeded needle pokes each month.      

Additionally, Unity Health has launched the Health AI Academy to train professionals across Canada in AI and advanced analytics usage in health care.

Back out west with Covenant Health in Alberta, Jon Popowich, the vice president of quality and innovation, said that AI usage across the provider’s 19 locations in 13 communities is in its “infancy stage.”

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Popowich said staff are encouraged to utilize the Microsoft Copilot — different than the productivity chatbot available to the general public — built within the frameworks and firewall of Alberta Health Services as it “helps with productivity, drafting certain things, doing minutes and so on.”

There are also health establishments in Alberta currently piloting AI scribes, tools that record, transcribe and summarize doctor-patient conversations in real time.

Popowich recognizes that the path forward with AI is convoluted as there are dynamics like competition, “keeping up with the Joneses and FOMO, fear of missing out,” propelling this sea change, but he warned that the human element cannot be discarded.

“When we look at digital health, the ones and the zeroes, or even in the old days, manually drawing graphs and counting things, those are still the experiences of individual people, sometimes at the most vulnerable moments of their lives,” said Popowich. “We have to hold that space with great responsibility. AI, for me, doesn’t change that. It should not change that.”

Consulting Catholic social teaching and provincial legislation helps Covenant Health leaders in their ethical considerations about adopting new technology. They also consider the duties to the people they serve, the opportunities and the concerns.

Simmers shared that Providence Healthcare strives “to be a Catholic voice in health-care innovation,” and that means “we think about ethics in all of our processes.” He shared that an AI symposium of Catholic health-care leaders with Vancouver Archbishop Richard Smith in March was helpful as one of the experts “really raised my awareness around the loss of human dignity if you take away people’s work and meaning.”

Discussions are already underway with professionals who are apprehensive about their work being replaced by AI.

“What we’re trying to get into is yes, it’s going to change your work,” said Simmers. “It’s going to replace certain types of work, and we’re having the conversation of what that would mean. We know health care demands are not going away. We’re in a unionized environment. This isn’t like a private company that can say, ‘hey, we’re cutting half our workforce.’ People are going to have work to do. We’re trying to highlight what that work is. You might actually have more time to talk to a patient.”

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The Mission Collaborative Initiative, a forum established by the Alberta Catholic bishops to respond to pressing issues in the public square, posited similar sentiments to Simmer during its 2025 forum centred on AI. Attendees suggested that one of the potential gifts is that more time will be freed up for care and accompaniment.

Popowich intends to be present for the 2026 event, which is also expected to centre on AI, and he expressed an interest in organizing a gathering at some point for Catholic health leaders to further discuss the ethical usage of AI in patient care.