For most health systems, accessing meaningful insights from patient data can be a persistent challenge due to its often fragmented nature. Most of the world’s health care data – around 80 per cent – is also trapped in unstructured free-text notes and documents.
For Toronto-based Verto Health, a scale-up supporting over 50 regional health systems and provider organizations, this fragmentation was a barrier the company was determined to overcome. Its Verto Connect platform addresses this by bringing together fragmented patient data from across acute, community, and primary care settings into a single, unified longitudinal patient record, enhanced with AI-derived information from structured notes. This gives health system users a complete view of each patient’s health care journey and reduces the manual ‘chart chase’ that often adds to clinician burden.
What remained was making it easily searchable by the people who needed it most – the clinicians. Extracting meaningful clinical insights from even a well-organized platform typically requires advanced Structured Query Language (SQL) skills that most clinicians and analysts don’t have and shouldn’t need. Verto wanted to build a way for health care workers to interact dynamically with patient data using plain language, but needed to leverage specialized expertise to build it quickly and effectively.
The gap between “data rich” and “insight ready” has long been a stubborn one. Verto came to Vector Institute’s HealthSpark program with a clear goal: use AI to close it.
A natural language bridge to the data
Over four months, Verto worked alongside Vector’s AI experts to develop a context-aware health retrieval algorithm – one that translates plain-language queries into precise data retrieval aligned to Verto’s pipelines and model schemas. Verto and Vector collaborated to design a query interface that works equally well for open-ended questions and a more guided, structured mode for users who need it. The program brought user-centered design expertise into the process, working iteratively with Verto’s clients to validate the approach and refine the query interface.
The result is a tool where a clinician can ask, in plain language, “Show me patients over 70 with a recent hospitalization and no follow-up recorded” and retrieve a consolidated answer drawn from across each patient’s full record, including unstructured clinical notes that would otherwise require manual review. The system doesn’t require users to know how the data is stored or how to structure a query but intuitively meets them where they are.
“The HealthSpark program brought AI expertise and technical and design capacity to our efforts to develop advanced query capabilities. Through collaboration with our HealthSpark counterparts we were able to fast-track the definition and validation of our approach for creating simple and intuitive approaches to ‘talk to your data.’ This program has helped us to accelerate the planned delivery of a key roadmap item to Canadian health care clients and beyond.”
From prototype to commercial impact
The collaboration produced concrete results. In addition to generating direct sales, the project yielded one new commercialized product and two new intellectual property assets, with a working prototype ready for demonstration in an operational environment. Vector’s team also trained and mentored Verto staff, building internal AI capacity that carries forward beyond the program.
And the commercial momentum is building. Verto’s affiliation with Vector has strengthened its credibility with health system clients and extended opportunities that fostered connections with health system leaders, investors, and stakeholders across the country. The AI capabilities developed through HealthSpark are being integrated into Verto Connect for commercial deployment.
“The Vector Institute HealthSpark program truly moved the needle for us and helped us gain speed to market to compete on the national and international stage,” says Hannah Seo, VP, Population Health & Strategic Growth at Verto.
For a Canadian scale-up competing against multinational, AI-native players, the ability to turn fragmented patient data into a simple conversation turns a product feature into a meaningful step toward how health care will be delivered.
Vector’s HealthSpark program is supported by a Government of Canada investment through the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev Ontario).
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