“There’s no algorithm for compassion. There’s no predictive model for compassion. And the only thing that technology will not be able to do is human compassion”

Healthcare innovation often begins at the crossroads of curiosity and necessity. For Dr. Amol Verma, a General Internal Medicine Physician at St. Michael’s Hospital, it started with a simple question: How can we deliver better care to our patients? In the mid-2010s, Dr. Verma and his colleagues sought to measure the quality of care being…

Ontario’s health care system experienced a seismic shift in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Technology-based primary care visits soared 56-fold while in-person visits dropped by nearly 80%. Amid the rapid pivot to virtual care and the near immediate decline in social connectivity, a pressing question emerged: can compassionate care translate through a screen? After…