Light breakfast served for in-person attendees at the Ottawa Marriott Hotel.
Dr. Nathan Nickel, HDRN Canada Executive member and Director of the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy, opens the forum and welcomes attendees online and in-person at the Ottawa Marriott Hotel.
Elder Elaine (Kicknosway Apatchitwane Elaine), Traditional Helper from Peter Ballantyne Cree Nation, will offer an Indigenous protocol and welcome to start the day in a good way.
The keynote panel will delve into an engaging discussion on opportunities and challenges relating to artificial intelligence and health from the perspectives of patient partners, researchers and clinicians. Moderated by Micheal Harvey, BC’s Information and Privacy Commissioner, the discussion features Dr. Amol Verma, Clinician-Scientist at St. Michael’s Hospital, Dr. Marta Maslej, Staff Scientist with the Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, and Charlotte Munro, HDRN Canada Public Advisory Council member. Together, they will explore key clinical, equity and patient engagement considerations in AI, with ample time for audience engagement.
Light refreshments for in-person attendees will be served at the Ottaw Marriott Hotel.
This interactive session fosters a dialogue between patient and clinician perspectives on the role of artificial intelligence in health care. Alvina Nadeem, an HDRN Canada Public Advisory Council member with lived experience using AI in their health care journey, and Dr. Alexandra Greenhill, a clinician specializing in digital health innovation, will explore both the benefits and risks of AI in patient care. Topics include responsible and ethical AI use and the evolving role of AI for both patients and health care providers. Participants will gain insights into the real world impact of AI and its future in shaping patient-centered care.
A buffet lunch will be served to in-person attendees at the Ottawa Marriott Hotel.
Concurrent Session 1
AI is reshaping health care, from streamlining documentation, extracting social determinants of health to automating administrative workflows and many other applications. While these innovations promise efficiency and improvement in the health care system, they also raise significant ethical and practical concerns. Despite the impact of AI-driven solutions on patients, their voices remain largely absent from the development process. A review of thousands of studies on AI in healthcare found that only 5.6 percent mentioned patient engagement. This disconnect raises ethical and practical challenges, influencing both trust and adoption.
In this session, Julia Wiercigroch and Parsa Balalaie will discuss how Upstream Lab has explored these concerns through patient and physician focus groups, uncovering key barriers and pathways to inclusive AI development. Their findings suggest that timely and structured engagement can enhance AI’s effectiveness, ensure equitable representation and align innovations with real-world needs. However, beyond engagement, systemic reforms are necessary. Data privacy policies, institutional data-sharing frameworks, and governance mechanisms must be reimagined to center on public interest rather than institutional convenience. Platforms such as OurHealthData empower Canadians to shape how their health data are used, ensuring AI serves the public good.
Concurrent Session 2
Health-sector organizations use tiered data governance models to steward data, ensuring its responsible secondary use. Collaboration between institutional bioethics professionals and researchers enables appropriate access controls to be applied to data. Such bespoke safeguards are proportionate to the sensitivity of data, and the risks that its use creates. In this session, Alexander Bernier explores the Canadian regulatory mechanisms that operationalize tiered data governance today. It will provide critical commentary upon the contemporary shift away from reliance on bioethics institutions to establish a practicable balance of rights and responsibilities in data, toward the heightened use of data protection institutions to regulate biomedical data use. New regulatory developments are assessed both in general, and relative to health-sector A.I. development.
How can the First Nations data governance principles of Ownership, Control, Access and Possession shape the future of artificial intelligence in health care? Skylee-Storm Hogan-Stacey, Julie McIntosh and Savannah LaBelle, from the First Nations Information Governance Centre Data Sovereignty Research Collaborative, will facilitate an interactive group discussion on how we can imagine the impacts of AI use in First Nations-specific health care using the principles of OCAP®.