By: Ania Jones, Senior Manager, Strategic Communications and Partnership Engagement, University Health Network
As AI and digital health care models are moving from promise to practice across our province and the world, to succeed in our hospitals, these innovations must reliably improve patient outcomes and expand system capacity all while being safe, scalable, and sustainable. One standout example is Medly, a made-in-Canada digital therapeutic developed at University Health Network (UHN) that has now entered a commercialization partnership with VITALL Intelligence, an Ontario-based Canadian leader in digital health solutions.
Medly's commercialization journey offers a blueprint for how hospitals can be the first customer for their own innovations and can then thoughtfully scale them to benefit patients across the province and beyond.
Medly is an AI-enhanced, Health Canada–approved Class II medical device[i] for remote care and patient self-management for people living with heart failure (HF). Built by clinicians and engineers at UHN's Peter Munk Cardiac Centre and its Centre for Digital Therapeutics, Medly combines an expert system and a patient-facing app to assess daily health metrics and provide tailored, at-home guidance to patients. Designed to support clinicians as well, it offers real-time signals on changes in patient status through a digital dashboard, enabling nurse-led teams — with physician oversight — to adjust medications and intervene earlier if required.
The results to date are compelling. Research has demonstrated a 50 per cent reduction in heart failure hospitalizations (Ware et al., 2020), 35 per cent fewer in-person appointments, and a 40 per cent faster optimization of complex medication regimens (Brahmbhatt et al., 2024). Beyond these numbers, the program's design helps patients take action at home, when timing is critical to avoid hospitalization and emergency care.
These outcomes matter because heart failure is on a rapid climb in Canada. With more than 50,000 new diagnoses each year, it now affects over one million Canadians (Heart and Stroke Foundation). According to the Heart and Stroke Foundation, HF remains the single most common reason for hospital admission and readmission nationally, driving pressure on emergency departments, beds, staff, and budgets. Projected costs for HF-related hospitalizations are estimated to reach $19.5 billion by 2040 (Ellis et al., 2025). In that context, digitally enabled models that safely shift care out of hospital are not optional—they are becoming essential.
Medly has already supported more than 2,500 patients at UHN since its first clinical deployment in 2018 and has been implemented across five Toronto hospital sites. Importantly, the program has also extended to Northern Ontario in partnership with the Weeneebayko Area Health Authority (WAHA) and Sioux Lookout First Nations Health Authority (SLFNHA). This partnership is a tangible example of ways in which digital health care models are advancing equal access: bringing specialist-guided, nurse-led HF care closer to home for under-served communities lacking specialist care.
Medly has already earned a U.S. FDA Breakthrough Device designation, recognizing its potential to offer a novel and effective care option for patients with serious conditions beyond what is currently available. The model of care enables specialized nursing supported by algorithmic guidance and physician oversight and directly addresses capacity constraints by ensuring each team member operates at the top of their scope.
The Medly platform is being enhanced with AI-driven tools designed to make care smarter, more personalized, and more accessible for patients and clinicians alike. These include:
- Medly Auto Titrate, an intelligent algorithm that supports clinicians by automatically recommending safe medication adjustments and optimizing a complex medication regimen.
- Medly AI – Learns from patient data to reduce false alerts and ease clinician workload. Ongoing improvements include managing complex treatment regimens more precisely while reducing unnecessary alerts and false positives — ultimately easing the workload for both patients and care teams.
- Medly Conversational AI – Lets patients share their daily health information such as heart rate or blood pressure and get feedback by phone, in multiple languages.
- Medly Auto-Documentation – Instantly logs patient's health information readings and notes into their medical records.
- Medly After-Hours Chatbot – Offers patients guidance and answers when their care team is offline.
UHN is advancing the next chapter of Medly's impact, including the development of additional AI functionality mentioned above, through its new partnership with VITALL, intended to eventually grant the company license to scale the platform for broader clinical use. VITALL already operates a proven health data utility platform that securely unifies clinical data, wearable signals, and at-home tests. Successfully integrating Medly into its platform can help deliver its innovative care model as a scalable service — starting right here in Ontario and with potential to do so globally — while maintaining the clinical principles that made Medly so effective at UHN.
There is a broader lesson here for Ontario hospitals: when we are the first customer for our own innovations, this can lead to better outcomes for patients and systems alike. Early adoption inside the originating institution creates a feedback process linking clinical insight from frontline teams with innovation builders seeking to improve care models; it brings in safety, privacy, and workflow integration; and finally, it produces real-world evidence that procurement teams and funders can trust. It also sends a market signal that clinician-designed tools solving real problems in our system will be supported, giving an extra confidence boost to potential partners and investors at the commercialization stage.
“Patients deserve access to the best care options that modern technology can offer," says Mark Taylor, Director, Commercialization at UHN. “To bring proven innovations like Medly into hospitals at scale, we need to update how we fund and adopt these —so that life-changing tools and therapies reach more patients faster," he says.
As we look to the year ahead, Ontario hospitals can play a leading role by adopting innovations they help create. By doing so, we accelerate safe adoption, shorten the path from research to routine care, and ensure that the benefits — like fewer hospitalizations, better medication optimization, and more equitable access — return to the patients and communities where the work began.
Medly offers a clear, Ontario-made example of delivering better care to the communities that need it most.
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Sources: UHN–VITALL media release (Aug. 19, 2025); summary outcomes as reported in published studies (Ware et al., 2020; Brahmbhatt et al., 2024; Ellis et al., 2025).
[i] In Canada a, class II device is a health product with moderate risk