Over fifty years ago, leaders at Harvard University Medical School were surprised when their colleagues across the Charles River at MIT announced the school was launching a molecular biology program. It was a moonshot bet that helped transform the engineering school into one of the world’s leading biotech hubs.

Today, leaders across Waterloo Region are faced with a similar chance to make a bet on the future. By combining its leadership in quantum, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence (AI) and health care, this region has the potential to become the global epicenter for the next revolution in medicine—if we can collaborate as an ecosystem.

That was the message shared at Founders & Physicians, presented by Communitech and hosted by Communitech’s Nabil G. Fahel. Over 200 guests filled the room, bringing together a mix of tech founders, frontline physicians, hospital executives, academic leaders and policymakers.

Fahel was joined on stage by two local leaders who have helped not only build Waterloo Region’s reputation in healthtech, but have cemented Canada as a world leader in medical research and innovations.

• Dr. Vivek Goel, President and Vice Chancellor of the University of Waterloo, brings a distinguished background in public health and academic leadership, having served as founding President of Public Health Ontario and a senior leader at the University of Toronto. 

• Armen Bakirtzian, Co-founder and CEO of Intellijoint Surgical, is an engineer who believes in finding problems before solutions. He founded the Medical Innovation Xchange (MIX) to help medtech companies scale, and he fights to close the procurement loop so that it becomes logical for Canadian founders to build, grow and keep their revenue at home.

Against this backdrop of local ambition and global opportunity, the two leaders unpacked the hurdles standing in the way of a modern healthcare future—starting with the sustainability of the system itself.

How to build a sustainable healthcare system

Dr. Goel began the evening with a look back at the origins of our healthcare model and why it struggles in today’s environment. 

"It was designed for a time when acute care was the norm. Now we live in a world of chronic diseases—arthritis, cancer, cardiovascular disease—but our healthcare system is still designed around delivering acute services,” Goel told the audience.

As the region gets ready to begin the design and construction of its first new hospital in over 50 years, Goel said it is an opportunity to rethink what the "hospital of the future" should be. Instead of a single building with thousands of beds, he challenged the audience to think about whether a flexible, data-driven hub-and-spoke model would be better suited to provide diagnostics and care remotely across the community.

“We've made a promise that everyone will have access to the healthcare they need when they need it. But delivering services costs more and more,” he said. “How do we continue with that promise?”

Putting AI to work in healthcare

Throughout the discussion and Q&A, Goel and Bakirtzian addressed the fears and hopes  surrounding AI’s use in health care. Goel pointed to AI’s use as a transcription tool that is already reducing the administrative work that takes time away from patients and the families of healthcare providers.

“I was talking with a family physician who's saying, 'You know, I get to go home and have dinner with my kids now, because I'm not spending two hours charting after the day.'” Goel recalled.

Even with advancements in AI and large language models like Gemini and ChatGPT, the speakers agreed that a human element remains essential for interpretation and liability. 

"Ultimately, I think healthcare requires a human element... Of course, I believe that physicians will become more productive with the use of AI, but in my view, it doesn't live on its own. You need an interpretation of that by somebody who has been trained clinically,” Bakirtzian said.

Breaking down data silos to advance health care

One area that the Canadian health care system continues to lag behind compared to similar systems is in how we use data. Goel and Bakirtzian shared examples of how Canadian data remains trapped in silos between hospitals, primary care providers and specialists.

"It's one of the reasons why Pfizer went to Israel first to deploy the Covid vaccine. Israel could do a clinical trial with all their linked data. They had a paper in The New England Journal of Medicine four weeks after the start of the vaccination program on the effectiveness. It took us 18 months to do the first effectiveness study in Canada,” Goel said.

The “north star” for Canadian health care is to become a learning health system where every patient encounter generates data that improves care for the next patient.

"If you do that for multiple patients, you can start to draw insights to do intervention and improve outcomes,” Bakirtzian said. “It empowers healthcare systems to deliver care at an intentional cost. We all like to think that healthcare operates independently from economics, but it doesn't."

Forget the podium, we need to own our destiny

The need for sovereignty, whether in AI, data or the supply chain, is a topic that is dominating conversations across Canada. Bakirtzian argued that Canada must own its destiny by creating and purchasing its own innovations rather than relying on foreign supply chains, which carry trade risks.

He emphasized that true economic value comes from domestic companies that keep their intellectual property and revenue in Canada, reinvesting in the local ecosystem. 

"The way we trade is not the same as it used to be, and there is risk in how we bring products in and out of our country. We know that things can change in an instant and we know trade can change in an instant as well. We obviously see that every day with tariffs,” Bakirtzian said.

The broken procurement model

Procurement continues to be the critical bottleneck preventing innovation. Despite Intellijoint’s expansion into eight countries, Bakirtzian revealed that Canada is still the most challenging market for the 16-year-old company.

"Canada is near the bottom of the file for us. Even though orthopedic surgeons were our designers and our clinical researchers, it's the funding system that didn't allow adoption," Bakirtzian said.

Goel noted that the Canadian healthcare system is fragmented, creating a "system" problem where the entity paying for a new technology is not the one reaping the rewards.

"The hospital doesn't benefit from the extra expense it has to make for innovative solutions. It's the system as a whole,” Goel said. “We're not set up to readily adopt these new types of technologies in an effective way.”

The solution, both agreed, lies in new reimbursement codes and funding models—like the "Health Innovation Pathway"—that reward technologies for delivering both clinical and economic benefits. 

For Bakirtzian, solving this is the key to unlocking the region's full potential.

"There's one piece of the puzzle left and that’s procurement. Once we solve that in this community, we can create the flywheel that will produce more and more entrepreneurs and innovation," Bakirtzian said.

The unique potential of Waterloo Region

There was a strong sense of local pride and strategic advantage in the panel discussion and Q&A. Bakirtzian told the audience that Waterloo Region has a unique "secret sauce" thanks to the collaboration between the University of Waterloo, tech ecosystem and local hospitals. 

Originally from Quebec, Bakirtzian moved to Waterloo Region to study at the University of Waterloo. Despite having no family ties to the area, he felt drawn back after graduate school, making what he calls an "emotional decision" rather than a logical one to build his company here. 

“It's been our mission to make it logical for other founders to not only start their businesses here, but to scale their businesses here,” he told the audience to a round of applause.

The combination of medical innovation with Waterloo’s strengths in quantum and nanotechnology was highlighted as the next frontier for healthcare.

“I think we're at the cusp of the next level down, quantum and nano. In the future, what we're going to be seeing is more and more applications in health, whether it's in drug discovery or in sensing or quantum computing and nano being applied into health care,” Goel said.