Abstract

In 2015, the Advisory Panel on Healthcare Innovation (APHI) highlighted shortcomings in Canada's healthcare systems, including weak integration, ineffective workforce planning and deployment, uneven infostructure and misaligned incentives. Progress in the last decade has been modest, underscoring both the challenges faced by provinces/territories in effecting top-down structural reforms and the limited yield from federal attempts to “buy change.” APHI anticipated that outcome and argued for a new bottom-up model of collaborative catalysis, evaluation and scaling of effective innovations in healthcare. This model also facilitates the selective commercialization of novel Canadian goods and services and bears consideration given our healthcare crisis and weak innovation indices.