Artificial intelligence is already being integrated into B.C.’s health-care sector and transforming how it is delivered.
Dr. Christine Hall, deputy registrar for the College of Physicians and Surgeons of B.C. said AI is already in “every part” of the work done at the college, which regulates B.C. physicians and surgeons.
“AI is not coming, it’s already here,” Hall told stakeholders at a recent health summit on Vancouver Island heard. “Diagnostic support, additions to reading of pathology, reading of x-rays, CTs and MRIs, documentation … personalized medicine, so the sifting of enormous data sets … individualized medicine, and then predictive analytics, in other words identifying high-risk situations.”
Hall was part of a panel discussion held during the Health Forward summit, Nov. 13, at Nanaimo’s Vancouver Island Conference Centre. The summit brought together health-care stakeholders and government officials from around the Island.
She said doctors currently use AI scribes within clinical work, triaging appointments. The AI scribe captures the notes, which are then edited by the physician.
“Your AI generates your follow-up list, your to-do list, your phone calls, your consult notes. That exists now. That’s fantastic for us,” Hall said.
At the same time, she said the inclusion of this technology brings an ethical conundrum for physicians, a big part of which comes from how the data set is built.
“The first thing that happens is the patient walks into the room and you give a speech-capturing model. So we all think we consent people to have the interaction recorded, that’s not what you’re consenting for at all,” Hall said. “That model is uploaded into the cloud to go into language-learning model templates and algorithms, then there’s redaction that happens because data is saved to a database for further learning of the system and then a report is generated.”
Other concerns included using non-Canadian databases that aren’t adapted to Canadian health needs, and bias against minorities like Indigenous or LGBTQ patients due to an overall lack of representation within the database.
“The second thing is due diligence, knowing what you’re buying,” Hall said. “Many AI vendors have indemnity clauses that say, ‘you can’t sue me if I didn’t write your note properly, sorry about that.’ So physicians need to be aware, there are some guiding documents … and the college has an interim guidance.”
Other panelists included Dr. Terri Aldred, First Nations Health Authority executive medical director for primary care; Dr. Raymond Ng, UBC director of data science institute; and Dr. Mark Morris, West Memorial Medical Clinic family physician.
Morris stated he feels that there is a risk of putting “too much trust” in AI and said it’s important to be transparent with patients, letting them know where the information will be uploaded to and how it will be stored.
“From a cultural safety point of view, I think we have to go by the principle of OCAP, and that’s making sure that we have ownership, control, access and possession of the data, and my fear is with it growing so large so quickly we’re going to have companies from the U.S. who are going to be in charge and taking our data,” Morris said.
“Right now have some Canadian companies, but unfortunately they don’t have the size and scope of the Americans so I think at the federal level we need to be working to ensure we’re controlling our data for our citizens in Canada.”
Ensuring doctors aren’t “overly reliant” on AI is also important, as systems can go down and some patients may opt out.
“On one hand we want to give them the tools to know the technology, what works well and what can go wrong, but also you want to make sure that physicians are actually thinking and using their own brain to kind of tease out permanent history, make a differential diagnosis,” Morris said.
At the same time, AI has been a “game changer” for family physicians, he said. He cited a study undertaken by Doctors of B.C., in collaboration with Canada Health Infoway and the eHealth Centre of Health Excellence, conducted from late 2024 until early 2025, in which more than 30 family doctors used an AI scribe for up to six weeks in more than 7,000 appointments, averaging 270 appointments per physician.
The results were an estimated 2.7 hours saved in administrative work weekly, as well as a reduction in after-appointment documentation time equalling 5.7 hours weekly per physician.
“Going forward, it could help me with writing a consultation letter, it can also eventually help with ordering investigations, lab requisitions, and then the bane of our existence, helping with [insurance] forms.”
Ng, speaking from the perspective of a data scientist, said he has been part of creating the technology for a pilot study in Vancouver, examining the use of AI to speed up treatment of cancer by months through noticing key biopsy flags during testing and automatically highlighting it.
“For the aggressive form of cancer, like breast cancer, every week of delay, every month of delay affects long-term survival and in B.C. the medium time it will take would be weeks and for some people even longer than six months,” Ng said. “So the usefulness of the [AI system] is that we can just do it directly.”
In his example, the patient would undergo the biopsy, after which it is flagged by the AI which detects the presence of three key traits. It’s then reviewed by a doctor to confirm the classification. An administrator then directly schedules an appointment with the appropriate provider, whether that’s a surgical oncologist to manually review the tumour profile with the patient, or directly to a medical oncologist to prescribe chemotherapy.
Due to the AI changing the process, the patient would have skipped scheduling a family doctor appointment to review the results, be referred to surgical oncology, schedule the appointment, meet the surgical oncologist to manually review the tumour profile, be referred to medical oncology, schedule the medical oncology appointment, then finally meet the medical oncologist.
“We are in a health-care system where we only have limited resources and the need both in terms of immigration as well as aging is going to have a lot more [impact] on the amount of our health-care resources,” he said. “We want to use evidence-based AI for us to make sure the people who need the most care get to the front of the line.”
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