5 Priorities to Strengthen Home Care and Digital Care

I started AlayaCare in 2014 because I kept seeing the same problem: home care organizations doing genuinely important work were being held back by outdated tools and fragmented systems. Coordinators manually piecing together caregiver schedules, nurses documenting visits on paper in their cars, and families getting inconsistent information because the providers involved in someone’s care could not easily share it.

More than ten years later, we have made real progress in digitizing these operations, but the broader system has not kept pace with what is possible or what is needed.

Canada’s Healthcare Crisis Is Reaching a Tipping Point

Canada’s healthcare system is under serious pressure. The population is aging faster than the workforce can grow. More Canadians are living with chronic and complex conditions that require ongoing, coordinated care. Costs are climbing in ways that provincial budgets cannot absorb indefinitely.

None of this is a surprise. But the response from most corners of the system has been to manage the pressure rather than address the structural issues driving it, and that approach is running out of road.

There is a real opportunity here, not just to stabilize things but to build a healthcare system that works better for patients, providers, and the public purse. Other countries are moving faster than we are. In order to lead rather than follow, Canada needs to get specific about who does what and when. Here is my view on the five areas that matter most.

1. Shift the Centre of Care to the Home

Most Canadians, when you ask them, want to receive care at home. The clinical and financial evidence supports that preference. Home-based care consistently produces strong outcomes, reduces hospitalizations, and costs far less than institutional alternatives.

Healthcare systems in the Netherlands, the UK, and parts of Scandinavia have been restructuring around this reality for years. Canada has not moved nearly fast enough.

Home and community care remains underfunded and underbuilt relative to the role it needs to play going forward. Provincial governments need to commit to multi-year funding strategies that treat home-based care as core infrastructure rather than a supplementary service. That means supporting digitally enabled care delivery, remote monitoring, and coordination models that connect providers across settings.

Nova Scotia recently made a meaningful commitment in this direction, investing in a modernized home care platform and working with technology partners to digitize assessments, scheduling, and referrals across the province. That kind of deliberate, funded commitment is what the rest of the country needs to get serious about.

2. Fix the Technology Infrastructure That Care Runs On

Talk to frontline healthcare workers about the technology they use, and you will hear the same frustrations over and over: systems that cannot share information with each other, records that do not follow a patient from one care setting to the next, workflows that have been nominally digitized but still depend on paper under the surface.

The result is that caregivers and coordinators spend significant time working around their own tools instead of using them, and patients experience gaps in care that a properly connected system would prevent.

The technology to fix this exists. What is missing is the policy commitment to require it. Policymakers need to mandate interoperability standards that require systems to share data securely across care settings. They need to tie public funding to actual progress on digital modernization, not just to the volume of services. And they need to overhaul procurement so that proven tools can reach the organizations that need them without spending years in a process designed for a different era.

A care coordinator who knows what happened to her client at the hospital last week, a caregiver who shows up to a visit actually informed, a family that does not have to repeat the same medical history to every provider in the circle of care: that is what functional infrastructure makes possible.

3. Take the Workforce Crisis Seriously

The home care workforce shortage is real and worsening, and recruitment alone is not going to solve it.

The pipeline of new workers is not large enough to meet growing demand, and the workers already in the system are leaving at rates that should concern anyone responsible for sustaining it.

A significant part of what drives attrition is administrative burden: caregivers and clinicians spending hours on documentation and scheduling tasks instead of with patients. That is both an operational inefficiency and a morale problem, and it compounds over time.

Health system leaders need to prioritize investment in tools that reduce that burden and do it with proper change management rather than simply deploying software and assuming adoption.

At the same time, our post-secondary institutions are still largely training healthcare workers for a system that is already changing. Digital literacy needs to be built into clinical education as a core competency, not treated as an optional module.

The workforce Canada needs in ten years is being trained right now, and the curriculum shaping that training needs to reflect the system those workers will actually be working in.

4. Move From Reactive to Proactive Care

Healthcare in Canada has historically been organized around response: a person gets sick, they seek care, the system reacts. For a significant share of conditions and hospitalizations, that sequence is avoidable.

When care organizations have access to good data and the operational capacity to act on it, they can identify a client whose condition is quietly deteriorating before it becomes a crisis, flag staffing and scheduling patterns before they lead to missed visits, and adjust how care is planned across a whole population of clients rather than one case at a time.

This kind of proactive, data-informed care is already happening across organizations on our platform, and the results are meaningful. That requires clear governance frameworks for how health data is shared and used, sustained investment in helping care organizations build the internal capacity to move from collecting data to acting on it, and standards that give both providers and patients confidence in how their information is handled.

The technology is ready, and the governance and organizational capability to support it needs to develop alongside it.

5. Back Canadian Health Innovation With Actual Resources

Canada has strong health technology companies. We have research institutions with deep clinical expertise, and we have companies that are competing and winning in global markets. What we consistently lack is the domestic capital and coordinated government support needed to scale those companies at home before they get acquired abroad or simply redirect their energy to markets that take them more seriously.

Canadian institutional investors and venture capital firms should be paying close attention to the home-based care and digital health space. The market is large and growing, and Canadian companies are well-positioned in it.

Government has a role too: expanding SR&ED, creating co-investment vehicles targeting health technology scale-ups, and treating healthcare innovation as an economic priority rather than a byproduct would each make a material difference. Other countries are doing this intentionally. Canada tends to do it by accident, when it happens at all.

The Future of Better Care in Canada Depends on Action

When people ask whether I am optimistic about Canadian healthcare, my honest answer is yes, with conditions. When I see what the best care organizations in this country are already doing with better processes and better information, I am encouraged. When I look at how slowly the broader system is moving to enable that at scale, I am less so.

Canada has the healthcare expertise, the technology sector, and, frankly, the need to be among them. What is required now is for governments to fund the infrastructure, health system leaders to drive adoption, investors to back the companies building the tools, and educators to train workers for the system being built rather than the one that already exists.

The Canadians who will depend on this system in 2035 are counting on all of them to get moving.