OBIO’s inaugural Early Adopter Health Network (EAHN®) Innovation Showcase

Oct 5

In October 2026, we hosted OBIO’s inaugural Early Adopter Health Network (EAHN®) Innovation Showcase at the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, marking a major milestone in our mission to drive the adoption and scaling of domestic health technologies across Canada.

EAHN® was launched in 2019 to support the adoption of innovation into the health system, in response to a series of consultations with executive-level stakeholders from Ontario health organizations and industry, as well as representatives from government and other affiliate organizations. Since 2020, EAHN® has expanded from a network of 17 healthcare organizations to 88 member organizations nationwide. This growth reflects our shared commitment to evaluating, validating, and procuring Canadian health solutions within our own healthcare system.

The Innovation Showcase brought together leaders from across this national network, featuring an executive panel of provincial, health system, and hospital leaders to address a critical question: How do we transition from initial adoption to broad commercial scaling?

Key takeaways from our panelists:

Dr. Andy Smith (Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre): Our health system is proving it can evaluate technology, but we now need “fast followers”. To overcome pilot paralysis, peer institutions must leverage existing, real-world evaluation data from completed trials rather than re-running separate, grant-funded pilots.

Estelle Ethier (Hôpital Montfort): Successful adoption relies on early alignment between executive leadership, clinical heads, and procurement teams. When a technology directly addresses an established clinical priority, procurement friction drops, enabling seamless integration across hospital departments.

Jamie Wallace (Supply Ontario): Innovators must look beyond hospital-level business cases and present a clear, value-based case to the province. By grounding procurement in health outcomes and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) rather than lowest-cost product specs, we can integrate validated technologies into standardized provincial procurement pathways.

Innovation Showcase

The showcase welcomed 15 health tech companies demonstrating that Canadian solutions are already clinical-ready, procured across the network OBIO® has built, and delivering real impact. To help these companies scale from 1 to 10 and 10 to 100 deployments, our health system must take a coordinated approach and act as a “fast follower”: buy Canadian innovations and accelerate their adoption across healthcare organizations nationwide.