• by Gord Hotchkiss , Featured Contributor, July 8, 2025

When it comes to the benefits of AI, one of the most intriguing opportunities is in healthcare. Microsoft recently announced that, when its Microsoft AI Diagnostic Orchestrator went head to head with 21 general-practice practitioners, the AI system correctly diagnosed 85% of 300 challenging cases gathered from the New England Journal of Medicine. The human doctors only managed to get 20% of the diagnoses correct.

This is of particular interest to me as a Canadian, because my country has a healthcare problem. In a recent comparison of international health policies conducted by the Commonwealth Fund, Canada came in last among nine countries, most of which also have universal health care, on most key measures of timely access.

This is a big problem, but it’s not an unsolvable one. This does not qualify as a “wicked” problem, which I’ve talked about before. Wicked problems have no clear solution. I believe our healthcare problems can be solved, and AI could play a huge role in the solution.

The Canadian Medical Association recently outlined the issues. The overarching narrative is one of a system stretched beyond its resources, with patients unable to access care in a timely manner. Human resources are burnout and demotivated. Our back-end health record systems are siloed and inconsistent. An aging population, health misinformation and climate change are creating more demand for health services just as the supply of those services is being depleted.

Here's one personal example of the gaps in our own health records. I recently had to go to my family doctor for a physical required to maintain my commercial driver’s license. I was delegated to a student doctor, given that it was a very routine check-up. Because I was seeing the doctor anyway, I thought it a good time to ask for a regular blood panel test because it had been a while since I had had one. Being a male of a certain age, I also asked for a Prostate-Specific Antigen test (PSA) and was told the PSA isn’t recommended as a screening test in my province anymore.

I was taken aback. I had been diagnosed with prostate cancer a decade earlier and had been successfully treated for it. It was a PSA test that led to an early diagnosis. I mentioned this to the doctor, who was sitting behind a computer screen with my records in front of him. He looked back at the screen and said, “Oh, you had prostate cancer? I didn’t know that. Sure, I’ll add a PSA to the requisition.”

I wish I could say that’s an isolated incident, but it’s not. These gaps is our medical history records happen all the time here in my part of Canada. And they can all be solved. AI excels at the aggregation and analysis of data beyond what humans can handle. Yet our healthcare system continues to overwork exhausted healthcare providers and keep our personal health data hostage in siloed data centers because of systemic resistance to technology. I know there are concerns about using AI, but surely these concerns can be addressed.

I write this from a Canadian perspective, but I know these problems -- and others -- exist in the U.S. as well.  If AI can do certain jobs four times better than a human, it’s time to accept that and build it into our healthcare system. The solutions to Canada’s healthcare problems may not be easy, but they can be implemented: Integrate our existing health records, open the door to incorporation of personal biometric data from new wearable devices, use AI to analyze all this, and use humans when they can do things AI and technology can’t.

We need to start opening our mind to new solutions, because a broken healthcare system is literally a matter of life and death.