Digital health statistics in Canada for 2026

How many Canadians use digital health services?

49% of Canadians have accessed their personal health information electronically, according to Canada Health Infoway's 2025 Canadian Digital Health Survey, released on 7 July 2026. The survey was run with Léger and included more than 11,000 Canadians.

The 2024 survey added detail on what that access looks like. Only 1 in 5 Canadians had access to a complete view of their health record. 41% had received electronic confirmation of a specialist referral appointment. Of those who created a point-in-time health summary online, 43% shared it with a provider.

What this means for you

Online access is now normal for half of patients, but the access most of them get is partial. A clinic that shows patients their own results, appointments and referral status in one place is still offering something most Canadians do not have. Our patient portal features checklist lists what that takes.

What do Canadian patients want from digital health?

Most Canadians want more digital access than they have. In the 2025 survey, 91% wanted to access their health records electronically, 82% wanted prescriptions sent electronically to their pharmacy and 75% wanted to make or reschedule appointments electronically.

Infoway also reported that many Canadians who want remote patient monitoring, email or text consultations, video visits and electronic specialist referrals have not yet had access to them. The release did not give percentages for those.

What this means for you

Online booking is the most practical gap for a private clinic to close. Three in four patients want it, and it touches only your own schedule, not a provincial system. Our guides to medical scheduling software and patient portal development cover the build.

How much time do Canadian physicians lose to paperwork?

Canadian physicians lose about 20 million hours a year to unnecessary administrative work, according to Losing doctors to desk work, a national physician survey report published by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) and the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) on 26 January 2026. The C.D. Howe Institute, citing the CMA, gives the more precise figure of roughly 19.8 million hours.

CFIB says removing that work would free up the equivalent of about 9,000 full-time physicians (the report page gives 9,093), or up to 199 hours per doctor per year. The C.D. Howe Institute reports that family physicians spend 10 hours a week on administrative tasks, about half of which is unnecessary.

The effects are large. 90% of physicians link the burden to burnout, more than half plan to cut their hours, and 25% are considering early retirement. 72% support eliminating some administrative tasks and integrating systems better, and 71% support interoperable patient records.

What this means for you

Half of a clinic's administrative burden is not clinical work. It is forms, referrals and records that do not talk to each other, and that is a software problem. When one in two physicians says the electronic record itself creates extra work, the fix is often integration and form automation around the existing system rather than a new one. See EMR software development and clinic management software in Canada.

If your clinic is one of those losing hours to re-keying and forms, count the hours for one week. Then enter them in the ROI calculator. Most owners have never seen that cost written down as a yearly number.

How is AI used in Canadian health care?

AI scribes, which draft clinical notes from a recorded visit, are the first AI tool with wide clinical use in Canada. In the CFIB and CMA survey published in January 2026, 28% of physicians said they currently use at least one AI scribe, and another 42% said they were interested.

These figures measure different groups and periods, so they should not be compared directly. Infoway's program gave more than 10,000 primary care clinicians a fully funded one-year AI scribe licence, according to the C.D. Howe Institute's April 2026 memo.

What patients think

Patient comfort with AI in their own care rose from 27% in 2024 to 35% in 2025, and awareness that some providers use AI scribes rose from 28% to 37%. In the 2024 survey, 67% of patients whose providers used AI voice recognition felt the provider focused more on them, and 38% would choose AI voice recognition at future visits.

What this means for you

Two in three patients are not yet comfortable with AI in their care, so consent and clear notices matter. For clinic software, the practical questions are whether your record system can accept notes from a scribe tool, where the audio is stored and for how long, and whether the patient's consent is recorded alongside the note. Ask those before buying any AI add-on.

What holds Canadian health care back from AI?

Privacy and regulation. In Statistics Canada's 2026 business survey, 26.4% of health care and social assistance businesses named cybersecurity or privacy concerns as a barrier to AI, against 13.4% of all businesses. 17.6% named regulatory concerns.

What this means for you

In health care, the privacy design is the product. A clinic tool that keeps data in Canada, limits who sees what, logs every access and can explain how it reached a result is far easier to approve than one that cannot. The proposed federal privacy bill would add rules on automated decisions and cross-border transfers; see Bill C-36 explained. The wider business picture is in our AI adoption statistics for Canada.

What does a health data breach cost?

Healthcare had the highest average breach cost of any industry for the 13th year running in IBM's 2026 Cost of a Data Breach Report, at US$6.64 million per breach worldwide, down from US$7.42 million in 2025. Financial services was second at US$6.29 million, and the global average across industries was US$4.99 million.

IBM Canada did not publish a Canadian healthcare figure. Across all Canadian industries, the 2026 average was CA$7.11 million, a record for Canada. Supply-chain compromise was the largest single cost driver, adding about CA$367,899 per incident, and the average breach lifecycle was 205 days.

What this means for you

Supply chain is the largest driver, which in a clinic means vendors: the booking widget, the fax service, the scribe tool and the developer who built your portal. Ask every vendor where data is stored, who at their company can see it, and how they will tell you about a breach. Our healthcare software development guide covers the questions to ask.

What are Canadian governments doing about digital health and AI?

Health is the first named mission in the federal AI strategy. AI for All, announced on 4 June 2026, includes an AI Missions Program whose first flagship mission is health: diagnostics, patient care and system efficiency. The strategy page lists $100 million for a Health Sector Data Space.

• The expanded Regional Artificial Intelligence Initiative (13 October 2026) names health and life sciences as a priority sector, and FedDev Ontario says AI adoption projects from healthcare and life sciences SMEs may be given priority. Details are in Canada AI funding for business.
• Bill C-36, tabled on 15 June 2026, would replace the private-sector part of PIPEDA. It is a proposal, not law. It would treat children's personal information as sensitive and add rules on automated decisions and transfers outside Canada.
• Provincial health privacy laws, such as Ontario's Personal Health Information Protection Act, continue to govern health information custodians. How a new federal law would sit beside them is a question for your privacy counsel.

What this means for you

Public money is pointed at health AI, and the privacy rules are getting stricter at the same time. Projects that are designed for privacy from the start are the ones that can use both.

How we compiled this

Every figure on this page comes from a source we opened on 23 October 2026 and is written as the source gives it, with its year. The list is under Sources at the end of the page.

• Patient data: Canada Health Infoway's releases for the 2024 and 2025 Canadian Digital Health Surveys.
• Physician workload: the CFIB and CMA report and release of 26 January 2026, and the C.D. Howe Institute memo of 23 April 2026.
• Commonwealth Fund 2025 figures are as reported by the C.D. Howe Institute; we did not open the Commonwealth Fund dataset itself.
• Business AI barriers: Statistics Canada's June 2026 AI analysis.
• Breach costs: IBM Canada's 2026 release, and Digital Health Insights' report of IBM's 2026 healthcare figure. Worldwide figures are in US dollars and Canadian figures in Canadian dollars, as published.
• Excluded: vendor statistics without a published method, single-province figures that their authors describe as estimates, and time-savings claims we could not trace to an original study.

We will update this page when Canada Health Infoway publishes its next Canadian Digital Health Survey.

What to do with these numbers

Start with the hours your clinic loses, then fix the gap patients notice most. A short checklist:

1. 1Count one week of administrative hours by task: forms, referrals, re-keying, phone booking, chasing results.
2. 2Mark which of those tasks touch only your own systems. Those are the ones you can change without waiting for a province.
3. 3Check whether patients can book, reschedule and see their own appointments online. 75% want to.
4. 4List every vendor that touches patient data and ask each one where it is stored and how they report a breach.
5. 5Before adding any AI tool, write down how patient consent will be captured and where the recording and the note will live.
6. 6Read the privacy by design checklist before you commission anything new.

We build patient portals, booking systems and the integrations between clinic tools. If you want to know whether your problem needs a new system or a connection between the ones you have, ask for a free assessment or see our healthcare portal development service.