After attending the 2026 e-Health Conference in Halifax, one message stood out above all others: collaboration remains the foundation of meaningful healthcare transformation. While technology, data, and innovation continue to advance, lasting progress happens when people work together across organizations, disciplines, and jurisdictions. Here are a few reflections from sixteen years of attending Canada's premier digital health event.
Refilling My Cup at e-Health 2026
Last week, I had the privilege of attending the national e-Health Conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia. As always, it brought together people from across the healthcare system: leaders, clinicians, policymakers, researchers, innovators, technology partners, and patients from across Canada.
I’ve been fortunate to attend this conference for many years, and there’s something about it that always leaves me both energized and reflective. Maybe it’s the pace of change or maybe it’s the rare chance to step out of the day-to-day and reconnect with people who are all working through many of the same hard problems.
The event was filled with thoughtful discussions about digital health transformation, data integration, innovation, and improving access to information for clinicians, patients, and health system leaders. But it wasn’t just about innovation or technology, it was about alignment. About realizing, again, that no matter how advanced our tools become, progress in healthcare still depends on how well we work together.
The Conversations That Stick
The formal programming offered valuable insights, but many of my most meaningful takeaways came from conversations in the hallways between sessions, over coffee, and during networking events throughout the week.
Across those conversations, a few themes consistently emerged:
-
- Everyone is moving faster, but not always in the same direction
- We’re generating more data than ever, yet still struggling to turn it into insight
- The appetite for collaboration is high, but the mechanisms to truly enable it still lag behind
It reinforced something I’ve been feeling for a while: we don’t have a shortage of ideas, what we have is a gap in coordination. Sometimes it was highlighted as the key factor behind a successful initiative. Other times it was identified as the missing ingredient needed to achieve greater scale and impact. Regardless of the context, I kept hearing versions of the same message: meaningful transformation happens when people come together around a shared purpose.
Collaboration Isn’t the Soft Work—It’s the Hard Work
Over nearly three decades in healthcare, my career has taken me from bedside care to hospital leadership, provincial initiatives, national programs, board governance, and now strategic advisory work.
Across every role and setting, one lesson has remained remarkably consistent. While technology, data, and innovation are essential enablers, people are what create progress. We often talk about collaboration as if it’s a nice‑to‑have. Something that happens naturally when people are aligned. But the reality is the opposite.
The most successful initiatives I have participated in were never defined solely by the technologies they implemented or the strategies they produced. They succeeded because of relationships, trust, and a willingness to work together across organizational boundaries, professional disciplines, and differing perspectives.
What Actually Moves the Needle
A collaborative mindset changes the conversation.
It shifts us from asking: "Why can't we do this?", to asking: "How might we achieve this together?"
That shift creates space for new ideas, stronger partnerships, and more productive dialogue. It enables organizations to navigate complexity while maintaining momentum toward meaningful outcomes.
Being a "Glue Person"
Throughout my career, I have often been described as a "glue person; someone who connects people, ideas, and perspectives.
I've always appreciated that description because it reflects something I genuinely believe: progress rarely comes from a single organization, leader, or solution acting alone. It comes from creating the conditions for people to work together effectively.
Whether through strategy development, governance structures, facilitation, or leadership, the goal is often the same: help people get on the same page, build trust, and ultimately move in the same direction.
Stepping back from the event, here are a few practical takeaways I’m carrying forward:
1. Start smaller, but align sooner
Big transformation strategies are important, but they often stall under their own weight. The teams making the most progress are:
- Beginning with clearly scoped initiatives
- Bringing the right stakeholders in early
- Building shared understanding before building solutions
Action you can take: Pick one initiative and map out who else needs to be involved earlier than they currently are. Then actively bring them in.
2. Treat data sharing as a relationship, not just a capability
We tend to frame data sharing as a technical problem. And yes, standards and infrastructure matter, but trust matters more. At the event, the most successful examples of data collaboration had one thing in common: strong, pre‑existing relationships.
Action you can take: Before investing in new tooling, ask:
- Do we have alignment on why we’re sharing this data?
- Do we trust how it will be used on both sides?
If the answer is no, start there.
3. Make time to ensure everyone is solving the same problem.
We are very good at execution in healthcare. Less so at pausing to ensure we’re aligned before we move. Many of the challenges discussed weren’t due to lack of effort, rather they were due to teams solving adjacent pieces of the same problem in isolation.
Action you can take: Build in regular, intentional checkpoints that aren’t status updates, but alignment conversations:
- Are we solving the same problem?
- Are our assumptions still valid?
4. Elevate the “connectors” in your organization
Every organization has people who naturally connect dots, translate across teams, and bring others together. They’re often undervalued because their work isn’t always visible. At e‑Health, it was clear these individuals are critical to progress.
Action you can take: Identify your connectors and:
- Give them formal roles in initiatives
- Include them early in planning
- Recognize their impact explicitly
Leaving With More Than I Came With
Beyond the innovative solutions, exciting announcements, and impressive accomplishments being shared across the country, I was encouraged to hear so many voices across Canada's digital health ecosystem reinforcing the same message.
There is real progress being made.
There is growing momentum.
And there is a collective recognition that collaboration remains essential to sustaining and accelerating that progress.
Final Reflections
After sixteen years of attending the national e-Health Conference, I continue to leave feeling recharged, inspired, and grateful to be part of such a remarkable community.
Technology will keep evolving. Priorities will shift. But the ability to work across boundaries (organizational, technical, and human) is still what determines whether anything meaningfully changes.
My “cup” wasn’t refilled by a single breakthrough idea. It was refilled by the collective sense that, despite the complexity, people are genuinely trying to come together to move this work forward.
And that's probably the message I’ll be carrying with me from this year’s event.
The strongest healthcare transformations happen when technology, strategy, and people move in the same direction.
Stratford Group helps healthcare organizations build alignment, strengthen governance, and create the conditions for effective collaboration across complex initiatives.
You may be interested in:
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
