Untangling the Information Ecosystem: Health, Media, and the Public

This transcript was produced by AI and may contain minor errors.

Nick Tsergas: Some of these pedestrian health Bureau stories could end up sparking an international incident.

Katie Bryski: Hello and welcome to Digital Health in Canada, the Digital Health Canada Podcast. My name is Katie Bryski.

Shelagh Maloney: And I’m Shelagh Maloney.

Katie Bryski: It is our 50th anniversary here at Digital Health Canada, which means we have 50 reasons for you to listen to the podcast. Reason number 14, we are live at eHealth, so you’ve been looking for a little bit of that conference flavor and energy.

You can find it right here. And today we have a very special show. Digital health journalism plays a crucial role in shaping how the public understands and engages with innovation and healthcare. So in this episode, we sit down with two journalists to explore the stories behind the stories. It is a great pleasure to welcome live at eHealth: Chris Hannay, health business reporter at the Globe and Mail, and Nick Tsergas, editor at Canada Healthwatch.

Thank you both so much for joining us.

Chris Hannay: Thanks for having me.

Nick Tsergas: Thank you.

Shelagh Maloney: Maybe Chris, we’ll start with you. Tell us a little bit about your career journey and what got you here to where you are today.

Chris Hannay: Sure. You know, if I go all the way back to like when I was a kid, the thing I loved doing the most as a kid was writing.

I would just write and draw all the time. I, I’d have stacks of, of paper in my bedroom with all the stories that I, uh, I love telling. And when I was in high school, a few friends and I started, um, a school paper at our high school. And when I was starting to think about like, what vocation am I gonna go into, I was trying to think of like, what is a way that I can sort of have a practical outlet, more career-minded outlet maybe for my writing, and chose journalism.

So I went to Carlton University to study journalism. And while I was there, spent any time I wasn’t working on in class, I was spending at the student newspaper and did a internship at the Globe and Mail and was very fortunate to stick around afterwards and had a privilege While I’ve been at the globe of being able to do many things.

For example, I was in our Ottawa bureau for about seven years, which was a amazing experience learning about how politics and policy and government work during the pandemic, um, wanted to shift gears, try something new and moved into the business department. Principally looking at small and medium sized businesses and how they were kind of navigating the pandemic.

And as I was kind of like surveying different industries, I became increasingly interested in, in healthcare businesses because so much healthcare in Canada really is delivered by small businesses, pharmacies, doctors’, offices. And I became really interested in how those were working. And so it got to the point that it was kind of my, my major interest at work.

That was all the stories I wanted to pitch. My editors were about healthcare and the business side of it. And I had to start really working to try to find stories in other industries. So I just asked my editors like, could I just write about this? And they liked the stories I had been doing up until then.

So they were, were happy to have me just focus on business of health and yeah, here we are.

Shelagh Maloney: You know what I think, and Katie, correct me if I’m wrong, I think you’re the very first guest who actually knew what they were gonna be when they were young and actually followed that path all the way through.

Everybody else, you know, I’m, I was an urban planner and now I’m the deputy minister of health and things like that, so. Wow, that’s really interesting. However, having said that, when you got into journalism, you had so many different experiences within that reporter role.

Chris Hannay: Yeah, I mean, it’s the, the, the great thing about being a journalist, uh, one of my, one of my great privileges is being able to just have outlet for my curiosity.

Shelagh Maloney: Well, it sounds like you’re passionate for your job comes through. That’s awesome. Nick, what about you?

Nick Tsergas: Chris and I actually have a lot in common. I think we’re around the same age. We both have a couple of kids. We both work in health journalism. We both read each other’s stuff. At least I, I hope he reads my stuff.

Chris Hannay: Of course I do.

Nick Tsergas: Oh good. Oh good. I read yours too. So we’re opposites in our trajectories. Like I have been a nurse for about 15 years and I started in critical care ICU and then I moved around like a fair bit to different areas. I was always curious to experience areas of the system that I didn’t. No. So I, I worked in primary care with HIV patients for a number of years and ran a PrEP clinic for a couple of years.

It was a great experience, worked in public health, and then I, I, I kind of always like had this character trait, I guess, where I would always ask questions about the issues that we were facing in all these different areas of practice. Why is it this way? Like, why, you know, it is this horrible way. Why, why can’t it be different?

And some people love that. Some people thought it was a pain in the ass. But eventually I started having kids and once, once that happened, I didn’t really want to commute into work anymore. So I started trying to like find things to do, kind of do at home for a few months while I looked after my kid.

When my wife went back to work, so I was like learning how to code and like working with AI a lot, like actually like working, working with it. And this opportunity came along. I was asked to sort of help build a health news aggregator, which quickly turned into me just launching and running a health news aggregator with some original journalism components.

That’s what Canada Healthwatch is. It’s an aggregator is focused on Canadian health news. We pull stories from across Canada and the world, and it’s designed as sort of a time saving tool for anyone who follows health policy developments very closely. So within two years – I think two years this month, actually – I got a, what I would call a micro audience.

It’s not an audience as big as Chris’s, but it’s way bigger than I thought it would be two years ago. One thing that’s really cool about it is just the process of like seeing stories come in and out from all the different outlets all the time has turned me into a kind of like librarian for health news.

So if an issue comes up, like something new happens and it’s like big news, I’ll often think, oh, there was like this obscure report in some local paper about this thing like six months ago, and I might flag it to a reporter, uh, or I might write about it myself in in my newsletter. So that’s kind of what I do and how I got there.

Shelagh Maloney: And do you describe yourself as a journalist?

Nick Tsergas: I do now. It was tough for me to make that internal shift, but I think I, I wear that, that moniker pretty comfortably these days.

Katie Bryski: I mean, I’ve heard it said that a, a writer is someone who writes. Sounds like a journalist is a person who does journalism, which is what you’re doing.

Nick Tsergas: I’m doing it.

Chris Hannay: How, how do you feel that your, um, kind of background in actually working in the healthcare system for so long informs what you do now as a journalist?

Nick Tsergas: You know, I, in terms of source, uh, development, like I, I already have robust networks of people that can talk to about any issue from administrators, like management, people, physicians, nurses, PSWs.

Right? I, I know everybody. And I, I’ve got lots of very tight relationships with people both from my past jobs, but also just being active in those healthcare spaces for so many years. It’s easier for someone like me to know where to look to find something. One thing that’s really cool actually Canada Healthwatch like runs on a bunch of RSS feeds.

It’s got like, I don’t know, I’ll just pull a number outta the air. Like 90 RSS feeds all like bundled up together with complex filtering rules and stuff like that. You guys don’t need to, you know, you don’t really care about that. But what –

Katie Bryski: I mean, I do. As a podcaster, I do.

Nick Tsergas: Totally. You would be into this, uh, maybe I’ll show it to you later, but what I was finding, uh, in the early days when I was just building all of that out, ’cause it took a while to get it to be robust enough until I would say it hit saturation.

So I would, as a backup, scour social media to see what health news was out there that people were kind of talking about that I was missing. And I kept finding Chris Hannay’s stories, and at the time he was a business reporter. And I, I would think, oh man, like this is like almost unfortunate that you know that here’s this guy writing about like a class action lawsuit in the pharmacy profession over like a major issue that affects everybody and it’s.

It’s in the business section where like the health administrators, they aren’t necessarily reading the business section. So, you know, I would always pull his stuff and I, and in fact I made a dedicated feed just for him. So whenever he published anything, it would, it would just get pushed, uh, straight to Health Watch.

So when he told me some time ago now, uh oh yeah, you know, I’m shifting over to Health Bureau and he is doing like this. Business of health thing. I thought that’s very cool and unsurprising and important. I, I think like we need that. I, I kind of bring a little bit of that too, but my role is different.

I’m, you know, an editor and a curator and uh, a booster, right? Where like Chris is, Chris.

Katie Bryski: You raise an interesting point ’cause I hadn’t thought of it that way. Like, some of these business of health articles showing up in the business section that health administrators might miss out on. But Chris, I was thinking particularly when you were giving your intro, I think a lot of.

People just in the general public might not necessarily link health and business. Curious if you can tell us a little bit more about, for you, what drove you to that intersection, why it’s really important for Canadians to understand the business of health.

Chris Hannay: There’s a couple things there. I mean, first, just on the issue itself, there’s a lot of business decisions that drive what kind of care that patients have access to and they drive the.

Incentives for professionals for where they go. I mean, economics is all about this sort of study of scarce resources. Healthcare system is full of scarce resources. Yeah. Business is part of that. In Canada, of course, we have a lot of our health coverage, although not all, is covered by public insurance plans.

And there is, there’s a lot to unpack in the word private healthcare, I think, and what private means, because private can mean. People paying out of pocket for services that should be provided under public health insurance. Private is also just, you know, like I said before, doctor’s offices are private businesses.

Katie Bryski: Yeah. I’m thinking like my family physician and her office, like she has a private business, but it’s funded under the public health system.

Chris Hannay: Yeah. Almost everything is, and and hospitals, although they’re, they’re public entities and there’s a balance there about what parts of the healthcare system wanna be run as businesses.

At the end of the day, there’s still a money component. Hospitals have to get a certain amount of funding and they have to make important decisions about how they’re gonna use that funding, what kind of, um, services that they’re able to provide their community. I think what I found so interesting about kind of having this beat and why I wanted to explore it more was that I kind of felt like there was for, for most of the, most of the time, there’s a big divide between business coverage and health coverage and lots of, I have very good colleagues.

Both at the Globe and elsewhere who are very good journalists who work in either business or health. But I found oftentimes the business stories would be so focused on numbers, on revenue, on expenses, on profits, and how much money people are making. And then healthcare coverage was not really talking about that much.

Maybe when you’re talking about like government and policy and how much money should be put into to things. But the sort of, the ways that those two connected wasn’t being explored for all the reasons I was, uh, I was talking about. So yeah, I find it a very rich man to mine. Uh, as a journalist. There’s so many stories out there.

I have a, I have a list of story ideas that I is ever growing, and I will never tackle it completely. I’m still learning to live with that feeling.

Nick Tsergas: I, I have a similar list and it’s been growing for a year.

Shelagh Maloney: It’s interesting, you know, when we had the even dinner conversation last night or at our opening plenary, we were talking about, one of our speakers jokingly said, technology vendors are all evil.

And it’s always been, you know, that private public sector and as soon as you say private and healthcare, it’s a, it’s a negative thing. And others will say, you know, healthcare should be, you know, managed more like it was a business ’cause we’re not paying attention to the bottom line and those kinds of things.

And so. When I hear you say all the things that you said is like, of course it makes sense that health and business could be, and the business of health and it’s a multi-billion dollar business, like it’s not small change and everybody is affected by the healthcare system and the business of healthcare.

Do people get that?

Chris Hannay: Yeah, I think it’s complicated. I mean, I think when I talk about that, I also, I’m not trying to put like a value judgment on it one way or the other about what shape our healthcare system should have. I’m trying to describe just the reality of what we have. Yeah. And you know, I think there’s a lot of Canadians who, who really value our healthcare system.

But the reality is also there’s lots of people paying out of pocket for things and you can’t ignore that.

Nick Tsergas: I think for most people pulling bears it out, attitudes are shifting. The sort of immovable monolith of public health care enjoying a widespread support across Canada seems to be crumbling a bit as the system is more strained.

But more recent polling, there was something I just uh, saw a couple days ago, new poll. Suggesting that most recently people are actually more supportive of bolstering and reinvesting and like doubling, tripling, quadrupling down on funding public healthcare. So it, it has shifted. I, I don’t think it’s sort of gone all the way back to where it was.

It seems to be oscillating a bit, but the overall trend might be towards slightly more favorable attitudes to privatization of certain aspects.

Katie Bryski: So it’s really making me think in this morning’s opening plenary, um, patient partner at least may be really talking about the role of health system literacy amongst the public and driving change.

Sort of that idea that you can’t advocate for what you, you don’t understand or you don’t know could exist. And so I’m curious too about kind of the role of the media and helping to build that awareness and that literacy amongst the public.

Nick Tsergas: Yeah. Health system literacy is, is really, really low. Chris, he might, he may or may not have the same perspective on this.

I don’t, won’t speak for him. Um, but I run Healthwatch, so I also see all of the social media comments. I see all of them.

Katie Bryski: Oh, fun.

Nick Tsergas: Yeah, it’s, it’s a hoot, right? Uh, and like most of them are great, but what, um, we post across like, you know, a bunch of different social platforms and after two years of like day in, day out posting news articles, one thing I can tell you for sure.

Is there are wide swaths of Canadian public who just like don’t really know how any of this works. Certainly the media has a role, but we have a huge problem in Canada that no one’s really talking about anymore, which is the news ban on meta platforms, right? So people do talk about disinformation and misinformation in healthcare, talk about that a lot.

But what they don’t talk about is the news ban. I think we really need to be systematic about approaching this thing. I don’t know what needs to happen here, but we cannot continue to live in a society where most of the people over 50 don’t see the news in the places where they’re spending most of their online time.

Most people over 50 are exclusively on Meta’s platforms. They’re on Facebook and they’re on Instagram. That’s it. There’s a good swath of the zoomer population that is just on Instagram, and these are the very platforms where you cannot click through. To a news article. You cannot share a news article

Katie Bryski: So far beyond the scope of this conversation, but as an observation, it is somewhat terrifying to me that one platform being affected can have such an impact on our population. And I’ve also never felt more millennial than I do right now. Right. Because I was like, yeah, Online News Act. Sure. I wasn’t on Facebook anyway.

Nick Tsergas: Yeah, exactly. Same, but, right. But there are all these people who are, and I think what it means for guys like Chris and and me is we’re writing for less people.

Right? Yeah. We’re writing for fewer people now, but the, the quality of the audience has changed. So I think the quality of the writing can change. Right. I have a micro audience. I, I don’t work for a mass outlet like the Toronto Star or the Globe and Mail. I’ve got my own thing, and it’s relatively tiny, but I know that the people who actually read my newsletter front to back are hyper engaged, hyper informed people, so I write for them.

I think journalism needs to recognize that we’re actually speaking to less people and different people than we were 10 years ago.

Chris Hannay: Well, I’ll say two things. First of all, I think that if we’re talking about what drives system change, I think media and public awareness, um, are both pretty key. I think in general, pretty much nothing changes without media and public awareness, and there’s an interplay there.

I mean, sometimes there’ll be an issue that starts getting bubbling up among the public and then media catch onto it and then continue it. And there’s some back and forth and, and there’s other times where the media might expose something. It might be a big investigation or a project or something that reveals, uh, new information and that gets some public galvanization and then things go from there.

And the second thing, sort of continuing on from what Nick was saying, I mean, the information ecosystem we live in is, is changing quite a bit. And we don’t have the same mass media driven by major journalism outlets, uh, that we did even a generation ago. One of my personal theories, I think, is that if we wanna continue to have good information out there, some of that’s gonna rely more on other players in our health system.

It won’t totally be, I don’t think, on journalism. I think journalists and media will continue to play an important role in that, but I think the people who are in the system, uh, will have to also be part of it more directly than they were before.

Shelagh Maloney: Thinking about what is our responsibility as people in the digital health space.

We know what the issues are. We know in spades what the issues are. Even back to your point, Katie, about Alies’s comment this morning is that patients and people who are using the system, who are part of the system, who are not working in this system, she, she quoted a study from Infoway that said 18% of the Canadians said that their care was compromised because the clinician didn’t have the right information.

That he or she needed at the time of the visit, and that was an 18% of Canadians reported that. But what percentage of Canadians wouldn’t know that there was missing information to even be part of that study? So it’s, it’s making sure that people are recognized that and are part of that. But it’s an interesting point about having people in the system have a responsibility to tell that story and say it in a way that might get to those 50 pluses that can’t access it through Facebook or their means anymore.

Nick Tsergas: Well, I’m, I’m interested in that comment actually. Like, what could that look like if you say like, people in the system need to take on some of this burden, clearing up all this, let’s say ignorance. What does it look like?

Chris Hannay: I think that there’s some people that are starting to do it. So like the Canadian Medical Association has their healthcare for real campaign where they’re trying to like, uh, myth bust a bit. It’s a great campaign. One other thing I wanted to plug on this topic actually was that my colleague, Samantha Edwards, wrote about this recently.

One of the things she highlighted was YouTube Health. Recently YouTube launched an initiative that verifies the credentials of creators making health related content and working with hospitals at the Ottawa Hospital, McMaster University, Faculty of Health Sciences, and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.

So that’s, uh, I think stuff like that I think is what we need.

Katie Bryski: I think there is an interesting question about trust. In there too, right? Like, um, particularly for institutions like the CMA that have that sort of credibility and especially to your point as audiences changes that our information ecosystem becomes increasingly fraught.

Yeah. I guess how you see the role of trust in helping to build that awareness and that engagement.

Chris Hannay: Yeah. Well, earlier this year I was at a panel where David Coletto of Abacus Data presented some information they had about trust and misinformation in the health space. And one of the things I, I really remembered from what he said is that generational differences is that sort of the youngest generation right now are more likely to trust a piece of information, like the more times that they hear it.

So it’s not necessarily just the messenger, but it’s the frequency. And so that’s why we have a lot of misinformation spreading. I mean, you have. On one side, you have a lot of good actors who have good information, but aren’t that public or aggressive about putting it out there. And meanwhile, there are bad actors out there who want to get their message out as much as possible.

They will create as many bots as they want to. They will post as often as they can to try to sway information. And I think there’s some asymmetry right now in, uh, those tactics.

Nick Tsergas: Oh, I mean, let’s build, let’s build that up a bit. That vision, like they’ll hire armies of influencers who, you know, have hundreds of thousands or even millions of, of audience members, followers, a piece asymmetry is just, it captures it, but it’s such an understatement. It’s amazing. And I, I agree with you, the good actor side, however that’s defined, really does need to take on more responsibility for fighting that fire with fire.

Katie Bryski: And Nick, I’m gonna turn one of your questions back. So like, what could that look like? Like for those folks listening to our podcast who hopefully themselves, those good actors.

Nick Tsergas: Right. Well, I, I think, uh, the CMA has a, a good blueprint through the healthcare for real campaign. Like they’ve allocated a brain trust and resources and time to creating a small army of influencers through their CMA media network, where they go on to platforms, they post about medical topics, they clear up missing and disinformation or lies if, uh, you prefer, they create very digestible, uh, YouTube videos.

Where these things can go on TikTok or Threads or, or YouTube, and they can, some of them get snapped up by, by quite a few people. This is content that differs greatly from something that Chris or I would ever produce, but it serves a, a really noble purpose and it reaches people again, because of the news band.

It’s, uh, it’s the type of content that is able to penetrate into areas of the social web where guys like Chris and I aren’t.

Shelagh Maloney: So, you know, Chris, over the course of your career, has your reporting changed the way you put things out? Has the globe, like are you talking about how you can make sure that, I mean, you talk about credibility in a trusted brand – like, the Globe has it. Have you changed anything in the way that you’re practicing to allay these misinformation and a volume of reporters that are out there?

And I use that term in quotes.

Chris Hannay: Yeah, I think that, uh, this is a whole other topic we could spend lots of time on. Yeah. But yeah, absolutely. I think we’re absolutely aware of that. Trust is a big part of our brand. And here I’m just speaking for the globe. You know, we put a lot of effort into making sure that the things we publish are true.

I can tell you as someone who’s worked as both an editor and a reporter, the amount of kind of behind the scenes work that goes into making sure even mundane piece of information are true and we can back it up. And part of that too, obviously, is our corrections policy. You know, if we get something wrong, our public editor takes a look at it and then we’ll print a correction in the newspaper.

And at least speaking for myself, it’s always deeply embarrassing when a correction is published, but you go through with it because you know that that’s how you can prove that trustworthiness to people that you’re willing to own up to mistakes if you get something wrong. The standard is always that you don’t need a correction, but if you do, you know, I think that that partly shows that we take those things seriously

Shelagh Maloney: And it’s interesting, I think even just the volume of information that’s out there. And so maybe shifting gears a little bit, you know, you said earlier you have a whole list of things that are, have interest to you. How do you choose your stories? How do you pick what you’re going to do today versus what you’re gonna do in three months from now?

Chris Hannay: It’s a complicated balancing act. There’s different things that go into it. Always trying to have conversations with interesting people. Keep up, uh, with news on, you know, on the document side, keep up with, you know, what studies are being published, what things are being filed in court. What’s coming into legislature is trying to keep on top of all of that and trying to balance the stuff that I’m interested in in any given moment with what’s kind of going on in the news.

So, I mean, the last few months I’ve written a lot about tariffs, which is –

Shelagh Maloney: Never heard of them.

Chris Hannay: Which is one of those like I gotta set aside a lot of time every month. Now just trying to track how different health businesses, particularly pharmaceuticals are, are gonna be affected by tariffs. So some of that’s driven by my own interest, and some of that’s just driven by events.

Nick Tsergas: I, I mean, I, I try to every week write a newsletter. I often work or some original stuff into that, but sometimes I just do an original thing I feel need for me. The, the need arises when a story comes my way, where, you know, I’m like, wow, yeah, that’s a story and no one has reported it. Because I see where, where everyone else is looking day to day, week to week.

So everyone’s looking over here, uh, and I see something over there. I’ll, I’ll write about it. If I don’t have time, I may, I may send it over and flag it to someone in a DM and hope, hope that it, uh, sees the light of day. And if it doesn’t, uh, then I’ll reluctantly write about it. Just to get it out there.

So that’s actually, that’s happened a bunch and it’s probably like one of the coolest things that I have been able to do with this project in, in this job is like surface these under-reported stories that sometimes turn into like major mainstream stories about a week later.

Katie Bryski: Do you see patterns in what jumps out to you?

Nick Tsergas: No. But there are buckets. Um, right. And I would say one, one of the buckets like that I see most often right now is one we’ve covered. It’s the business of health because the only business of health reporter in the country is Chris Hannay.

Katie Bryski: Hey, he was on our podcast once.

Nick Tsergas: That’s right. Yeah, I heard of that guy. Um, so if we had more of them, if we had more Chris as we, we prob, that probably wouldn’t be as much of a bucket of under-reported stories. Because most of the health journalists in the country are really focused on that health journalism angle as it’s very loosely defined.

But as we discussed, it doesn’t really include the business angle. And some of those business angles are really important. People really want to know about that stuff. The other bucket, uh, one that I, I watch pretty closely is the American stuff. So like for example, about a month ago, the US government rolled out this website.

To encourage whistleblowers in air quotes, to report doctors providing gender affirming care to anyone under 18 in the US and in Canada. And that’s the hitch. That’s, that’s for me is what took this from a, oh, whoa. This isn’t just a trans issue story. This is a national sovereignty story. They’re encouraging whistleblowers, right?

So they can have a public list. Of, Hey, this doctor here who, you know, works here at this address in Canada, does this thing that we don’t like. Right? And no one reported it. So, uh, I did, I, I wrote about it in the newsletter. A few days later, the people I interviewed said Global News, CBC, CTV, came sniffing around and they, they’re working on the story now.

One of them called the US government and said, what’s going on here? And they changed the form. They took Canadian data fields out. So things like the, that are the stories that kind of keep me up at night.

Katie Bryski: Just thinking about what we talked about earlier about some of the stories we tell is also driven by environmental context.

Like, wow, I, I knew health wasn’t just about health, but it’s interesting that health is also sometimes sovereignty. Yeah. It’s also sometimes not just cybersecurity, but national security.

Nick Tsergas: Right. And, and some of these pedestrian health bureau stories could end up sparking an international incident.

Shelagh Maloney: So Digital Health Canada podcast, most of our listeners are in this space.

How many of your stories are generated by Canadians or people in the industry that Nick, you feed? Chris, you said sometimes, right? How does that work? What does that look like? Yeah. How do you people reach out the time?

Nick Tsergas: So I, I, and I’m sure it’s the same for Chris, I get DMs and emails like constantly.

Shelagh Maloney: What percentage do you take up, or are of interest?

Nick Tsergas: I don’t know. I, I probably get, uh, far fewer than Chris, so maybe the percentages work out to be roughly equal. I, I think I ended up writing about maybe 2% of the tips that I get.

Chris Hannay: Yeah, I, I am inundated, but every once in a while I, somebody, uh, mentioned something that’s interesting, so I, so my stories are a mix of my own curiosity and people bringing things to my attention.

I guess one of the things in the challenges of telling the stories of digital health, I thought maybe I’d talk a little bit about, I had a big piece in the globe about medical records and the state of electronic medical records in Canada, and one of the big challenges I had for myself when I was trying to figure out how to write it was, I think there can be a tendency, I mean, even if, when you, when you talk about electronic medical records, what does that mean?

Like what? You can’t touch it. It’s like this abstract, almost abstract concept, so. As I started talking to people in the space and learning about the space, I, I felt that there could be a tendency sometimes to sort of retreat to these kind of big picture, abstract concepts, the frameworks, the roadmaps.

This isn’t like denigrate any of the good work being done there, but you know, when, when trying to communicate to people, particularly outside the field, I think a lot of those things were hard to understand, really to to hold. So when I was writing the story. My big challenge to myself was really how do I make this stuff as tangible as possible?

So how do I tell one person’s story, at least one person’s story? One patient’s story, what they went through? How do I bring the reader into environments where there’s people doing things? You know, the best stories are really people doing things. So that, that’s really the challenge I put to myself. I mean, it meant in the writing of it that there were a lot of other details maybe on the industry that I couldn’t get into.

Because I had to make sure I, I had enough space to give readers things to hold onto.

Shelagh Maloney: Well, it’s interesting ’cause one of the things that, this is Digital Health Canada’s 50th anniversary and, and one of the things that we’re asking people is how do you even describe what you do? I do digital health.

Nobody has a clue like, well, I’m a teacher. I’m a, I’m a nun. Like, I get that. I’m an engineer. So how would you describe digital health

Nick Tsergas: right now is disruptive. You know, there’s this big push towards interoperability and that’s something that, that me and my nursing background and all of my years working with VMRs and knowing, uh, a bit about this stuff, I know a fair bit more about it now, always supported something I have brewing.

It’s not so much a story as a question that I think is going to lead to some stories is when might interoperability be a bad thing and how might it actually be weaponized against people? Because there are ways. And I think some of those will become clear pretty soon if you’re watching some of the developments coming out of the health department in the States.

But yeah, it’s disruptive. Uh, and you know, just with disruption comes opportunity for change, but it’s not necessarily good change. So it could be good, it could be bad, and we want to be sure that we’re steering the ship conscientiously.

Chris Hannay: I think there’s awareness of this, but like, you know, we’re like interoperable.

I think is a pretty classic one for if you told somebody outside the industry, if I, you know, right now we’re recording this podcast in a conference center, I can see people walking on the sidewalk. If we were to go out there and be like, what do you think about interoperability? You’d probably get a blank sta stare back.

Right? Yeah. What is that? Yeah. And yet it’s, it’s really important. It’s about patients being able to see their records, it’s about their records. Being there, whether they go to an emergency room or a doctor’s office, like it’s a, it’s a really important issue, but sometimes we can get a bit lost in the jargon and terminology and lose sight of like, what it actually means tangibly to people.

Shelagh Maloney: I, I think that’s so important. I think, and reporters do that so well, like, and your stories and the electronic medical records, like Yes. This is, see, this is what you’re trying to say. And I think frankly, COVID did us a lot of favors, right? Because I, I do digital health or health informatics and this like.

You know, when you during COVID and you got a virtual appointment with your doctor, it’s like, oh yeah, that’s kind of what we do. So it’s just, but it’s like you’re saying, bringing it home and telling that story. So I, I really like that response and it’s so true. And the point that we do have all this jargon that we don’t even, we’re not even aware that we’re using it and won’t even talk about acronyms, ’cause that’s the other thing.

Nick Tsergas: Oh yeah. Well, a fish doesn’t know it swims in water, right?

Chris Hannay: Yeah, yeah. I mean, like virtual, virtual healthcare is healthcare. Right. It’s just like, it’s a different way to talk to your doctor.

Shelagh Maloney: Well, and we, we always say that digital health is just health.

Nick Tsergas: I think it’s a good attitude. Very fitting for your 50th anniversary season for that to come up. Uh, again and again. Digital health is just health.

Katie Bryski: You’re not gonna change your name though, right? Digital Health Canada.

Shelagh Maloney: Health Canada is taken. I was just gonna say that. Yes. So we can but it, but it’s so true and I think that what differentiates us and because many people would not walk into a bank to do their banking, and the same with, you know, virtual.

We’re not quite there yet, but I wanna. Zoom with my doctor. I wanna be able to send in a quick email or chat to a bot. Not everybody, but I think we’re increasingly seeing that there’s so much potential of things to, to make things better. And one of the things we talked about over the last couple of days is around public, and is that going to be the impetus for making change?

You know, Chris, I think you said earlier, media and public pressure make change. Have we become too complacent in healthcare as. Canadian population that we’re okay to wait six months for an MRI. Any thoughts on that?

Chris Hannay: You know, one thing that was interesting, so last year there was, um, Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Conservatives, published a really interesting op-ed in the National Post where he talked about like saying, you know, I’m not gonna meet with lobbyists, corporate Canada.

If you want to make your voices heard, make people care about it, make public awareness for an issue, and then I’ll listen to it. And, you know, you can agree or disagree on different aspects of that and the degree to which the government should or shouldn’t engage with, um, corporations. But I think as, as a general piece of advice, I think it’s pretty interesting.

Whatever kind of change you wanna make, get people on board with it and people will listen to you.

Nick Tsergas: It’s really cool that you bring that up. I remember that. I remember that op-ed, and I remember reading it time and thinking, wow. Like, yeah, cool. That actually sounds. Good. I think, you know? Yeah, yeah. You went over the public and sort of tyranny of the majority.

Give the people what they want. Intuitively it sounds good. As I pointed to earlier, I think as, as journalists and media and media outlets, the publishing of op-eds are also banned on meta platforms. I think it’s just harder. It’s actually more difficult for us to now than it was 10 years ago to create a mass public movement based on reporting.

Still happens. But I think those movements are smaller now than they used to be without some sort of spark of quo. Um, that takes something and makes it viral. But of course, when it goes viral, it now does so in the form of screenshots and someone just writing a Facebook post about a thing that they read or a thing that they heard from their buddy who read a thing, right?

And, and you can’t track that. So it’s all become much less top down. We’re still as a society, I think living through experiencing and untangling those effects.

Katie Bryski: You know, I do really appreciate, and I know Shelagh does too, the two of you being here to help us untangle the moment that we’re in, to have this chapter of our story recorded on the podcast and really appreciate your insights into the power of story.

I think that having that public awareness driven through story feels not just, I guess good for the future, but it also feels very human. And again, that’s what we are all here for. So thank you.

Nick Tsergas: Thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks so much. And congrats on your, your, you know, 50 years of digital health.

Shelagh Maloney: And you know what, so we’ll have come back here 50 years from now, maybe not the four of us specifically, but it’s like Coach Digital Health Canada.

Who knows what it’ll be in in 50 years from now.

Chris Hannay: We’ll be like Futurama with our heads.

Shelagh Maloney:  Yeah, that’s right. We won’t physically be here. Thanks so much guys. Thank you. That was really good.

Katie Bryski: That was a wide ranging conversation.

Shelagh Maloney: Yeah. It was very different from what I think we normally do. Right. One of the things that, this conversation was an interesting sort of analogy. So, you know, in digital health we said like, it’s changing so quickly and we’ve got new technology and AI and disruption and patient’s role, et cetera.

And it’s kind of interesting because I, there’s real parallel to media and you know, talking about how people get their news differently, who they listen to. Who are the most trusted people or, or not trusted people? The, the level of misinformation, disinformation, it’s almost as like the digital health world and the media world are both changing quite significantly, and to some degree we are reliant on that industry.

So we need to be aware of the changes that are happening in the media and social media so that we can potentially better bring awareness to what we’re doing and educate people about what we’re doing.

Katie Bryski: Yeah, that actually helps me articulate a thought I kind of have had during the conversation when we were talking about using influencers in different partnerships in different ways for people to get their news.

And I was kind of thinking, well, surely that is supplementing, that’s not replacing traditional news media. But it makes me think about how, in how like digital health, it’s not just about digitizing an analog method, like it’s not taking a paper chart and putting it on screen. It’s about imagining something wholly different.

And I wonder if that’s the case too with our information ecosystem, right? It’s not just taking, say, legacy media outlets and digi – well, they’re mostly digital, but like, 2025-ing them. It’s like, no, but like whatever it is, it’ll be something wholly new.

Shelagh Maloney: Well, you know, and it’s interesting ’cause you’re thinking about, we talked this conversation about an audio podcast versus a video podcast.

Yeah. Talking about no one’s going to stop scrolling. And I was really struck with the comment that Chris made, that he had heard from this David Colette about the frequency. You know, we always say everyone has to see a story seven times before it sticks or something like that. Like that’s my communication background.

But like I know that that’s a thing, right? But the more frequently you hear things, the more validity they have for you. The more you trust them, that’s a totally different thing and that’s a bit scary actually.

Katie Bryski: A hundred percent. There’s also timeliness, I think is another one of those types of biases.

Like the first time you hear something is often like the first piece of information. Like it’s harder to change your mind after you’ve accepted it. Yeah. And that’s where I think some of these malevolent actors move faster. Who’s first to the punch is the one who gets to set the story and it becomes much harder to dislodge it after.

Shelagh Maloney: That’s a really good point. And you know, thinking about, okay, so all the things that we talked about over this last little while, what does that mean to us, you know, in the digital health space? How do we do our, do things differently? And I think it’s always been a struggle for us. ’cause you know, when you talk about healthcare, people care about the numbers of dur nurses and doctors, and access to physicians and wait times.

And building better infrastructure doesn’t fall in anybody’s kind of probably top 10. However, the implications of not having the infrastructure mm-hmm. Are significant. And you don’t wanna be the boy who crossed well for the messenger. Like the sky is falling, the sky is falling. ’cause those other things are very, very important and equally important, maybe more important in some cases.

But do we learn anything about how we tell our story and, and what messages we convey and to whom and how.

Katie Bryski: And what’s our responsibility? What is the risk or the impact of not telling our stories, of letting someone else set that narrative?

Shelagh Maloney: Well, I think there’s 1500 people at this conference of each of us told two friends, you know that it ripples, right?

Yeah. And so on and so on.

Katie Bryski: A positive pyramid scheme. Yes. Okay. Love it. Well, we still have another day and a half of conference to be connected, empowered, and inspired. And listeners at home won’t have to wait quite that long because we will be back next month with another episode of Digital Health in Canada, the Digital Health Canada podcast.

Thank you for listening to today’s episode. Digital Health Canada Members can continue the conversation online in the community hub visit digital health. canada.com to learn more. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast to get new episodes as soon as they’re available and tell a friend if you like the show.

We’ll see you next month. Stay connected, get inspired, and be empowered.