Ontario Health

At the time, she was the director of the Sandra Rotman Center for Health Sector Strategy at the Rotman School of Management.

But soon after, she accepted a new post as a strategic advisor on primary care to Ontario Health.

And the insurance company, it's called CZ.

It was actually our very first stop on this trip.

In Ontario, for instance, every licensed long-term care bed is subsidized and rate regulated.

So you get in through Ontario Health at home or you don't.

And you pay more for a private room inside a licensed home, but the price is set by the government.

and its own waiting list, so you're buying a room, it's not care and not speed.

And again, Canada has its own version of the same pattern.

Ontario's enhanced extern program pays nursing and allied health workers for unregulated hospital care work, explicitly framed by Ontario Health as a recruitment tool, and a learn and stay grant covers full tuition in exchange for a service commitment.

Same logic as that US program, same logic as the Cadet Nurse Corps, but we keep reinventing small employer by employer versions of a solution that a national government already ran successfully at scale 80 years ago.

We just need the will to do it again.

The other important change was that the lab provider who was responsible for sending out the tests, collecting the tests, doing the tests, and then reporting it back, change to a different lab provider from the one that it was before so it went from life labs to icl or in common laboratories which is a different provider so those are the major changes that happen as of july

1st and when they made this change they changed the communication standards around it and i think that's more your area in terms of being the the digital safety officer and so on And so tell us a little bit about what some of the changes were and what some of the concerns are that the SGFP has and what's been communicated back to Ontario Health and so on.

Yeah, absolutely.

So as

Honestly, when they were evaluating this, whatever criteria, there was nobody that said, well, what is the impact going to be in the family doctor's office? I bet you, like, zero.

And I think you're fair

to say that because in your advocacy campaign, you sent a letter from the SGFP to Ontario Health talking about a lot of these issues.

And they still went ahead with the go live date of July 1 of 2026.

Well, for example, our mental health clinicians might help them access respite or work on solutions that You know, maybe your child can provide some support for the duration of this group.

But what kind of respite is available in the community as well? Like through Ontario Health at Home, for example, people get PSW support.

So that's a challenge, absolutely.

I'm not trying to say it's easy to do that, but we've helped problem-solve around that so that people can come or attend virtually as well.

Well, yes, of course.

So we've, we've had significant changes in terms of, uh, Ontario Health measures wait times for all of our, um, uh, all, all hospitals and, uh, and they, they put out, uh, rankings.

So, uh, two of our hospitals, um, jumped into, um, the, the, the top five, uh, in terms of, uh, rankings.

Um, we've managed to...

So the metrics that we, um, Ontario Health often measures, uh, looks at the, the ninetieth percentile.

But when we look at even, um, break it down further at, at our Birchmount site, uh, seventy-four percent of our patients will see a physician within, um, in less than two hours.

Hmm.

What actually changes when a physician moves from treating the patient in front of them to helping lead the system responsible for caring for thousands more? I recently sat down with four physician leaders who have made that transition, and what followed was a very engaging conversation about what leadership actually looks like from the inside.

Dr. Varun Kapila is provincial lead for vascular at Ontario Health, and he's a vascular surgeon who practices at McKenzie Health.

He's also past president of the Canadian Society for Vascular Surgery, and he's the author of Six Lessons for Everyday Leadership.

Dr. David Roberts is dean for external education at Harvard Medical School.

He works at St. Thomas Elgin General Hospital.

He's a peer-to-peer consultant and currently serves as emergency department lead for Ontario Health in the southwest region of Ontario, working to improve emergency care systems at scale.

Dr. Shah is known for his practical bedside-focused teaching and deep experience in clinical decision-making across diverse settings, which gives him a very unique lens on what we're gonna talk about today, which is how to make decisions about imaging in the emergency department.

Thanks, Anton.