In 2023, federal, provincial and territorial governments created Health Workforce Canada with a mandate to transform health workforce planning. Strategic initiatives focus on convening networks, advancing data, catalyzing modelling and forecasting and sharing promising practices. Early successes feature extensive collaboration and co-creation, data dashboards to assist planners and decision makers, an early microsimulation modelling tool to enable working with imprecise data and an artificial intelligence-powered Digital Front Door to enhance access to quality health workforce information and support informed decision making. Early efforts are having a positive impact on health workforce planning, data accessibility and catalyzing innovation and transformation.

Ten years after the Advisory Panel on Healthcare Innovation's report, progress on its recommendations remains limited across Canada. Coordinated, patient-centred, digitally enabled reforms and stronger interjurisdictional collaboration are urgently needed.

Ten years ago, the Advisory Panel on Healthcare Innovation, chaired by C. David Naylor, gave its prescription to strengthen Canada's healthcare systems. Unfortunately, the report fell victim to politics and shifting government priorities. This commentary argues that key barriers to healthcare improvement in Canada - particularly siloed structures that prevent collaboration, a lack of political will to challenge the status quo and a myopic federalism paradigm - continue to bedevil Canada's health systems, and that the recommendations of the Naylor panel, particularly the proposed healthcare innovation fund and federal healthcare innovation agency, are as relevant today as they were in 2015.

According to Manns et al. (2025), Canada struggles to turn good ideas into routine care because functions for evidence, funding, procurement and delivery are fragmented. In the UK, these functions are, in part, connected within a tax-funded service free at the point of use. This commentary maps the architecture, linking research translation, independent assessment, regulation, procurement, adoption support and data and explains how evidence moves into practice through principles aligned with the nonadoption, abandonment, scale-up, spread and sustainability framework, which addresses nonadoption, abandonment, the challenges of scale-up, spread and sustainability. Two worked examples, placental growth factor testing and stroke imaging artificial intelligence, show that national assessment, adoption support and procurement enabled rapid adoption at a national scale. Practical implications for Canada include a single repeatable pathway from promising evidence to routine use, conditional adoption with evidence generation, national frameworks that reduce transaction costs, investment in implementation capability and secure data environments for real-world evaluation.

It is valuable to reflect on what progress the federal, provincial and territorial governments have made on implementing the Advisory Panel on Healthcare Innovation Report's recommendations. The recommendations offered by Manns et al. (2025) are a good starting point but are too modest. New entities need assurances of independence from federal, provincial and territorial governments; scale system interventions; ability to influence provincial and territorial health system funding policies including physician remuneration models; and capacity to integrate with regional priorities. To pursue the sought innovations, political will for reforming the structure of pan-Canadian healthcare organizations is needed.

Health systems in developed countries face escalating challenges, including rising costs, workforce crises, safety concerns and persistent inequities. Despite widespread recognition of the need for transformation, progress has been slow and fragmented. The Canadian experience underscores this reality: a decade after the federal health minister's Advisory Panel on Healthcare Innovation released its landmark report, many of its key recommendations - including a $1-billion innovation fund and a national healthcare innovation agency - remain unfulfilled. During this period, system pressures have intensified, compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic and growing financial constraints. At the same time, digital technologies, particularly artificial intelligence, offer unprecedented opportunities to redesign care delivery, though adoption has been patchy and uncoordinated. This commentary argues that health systems must embed innovation into their core mission, linking transformation with economic development through clinician- and patient-driven solutions, commercialization, procurement reform and sustained national strategies to ensure that healthcare becomes both sustainable and socially generative.

Federal Health Minister Rona Ambrose created the Advisory Panel on Healthcare Innovation, asking them to identify five priority innovation areas that would improve accessibility, quality of care and health spending. Their 2015 report found fragmented systems, a lack of collaboration across jurisdictions to share learnings and best practices and undercapitalized technological advancements, among other barriers to spreading successful innovation. Ten years later, we review the report's main recommendations and examine progress in the key areas identified for action. Progress on many of the recommendations is lacking. The panel's main recommendations - creation of a $1-billion innovation fund to enable sustainable changes in care delivery and a national healthcare innovation agency - have gone largely unanswered. We illustrate the need for an innovation agency that spans all provinces using several examples, including ones where digital health innovation is required, including central intake and triage for specialist referrals. We discuss the conditions needed for successful implementation: An interoperable digital solution, changes to models of care and funding flows, leadership and a patient-centred culture within the health system. We also highlight how local innovation hubs enable the development of new technologies and identify the key local, provincial and national factors for success that should be considered for a new federal agency.

Progress on the report of the Advisory Panel on Healthcare Innovation (2015) for Canada is limited. While Manns et al. (2025) advocate for a national innovation agency and fund, their analysis underemphasizes the catalytic role of health data infrastructure as the foundation of an innovation engine. Consequently, Canada has not cultivated the strategic infrastructure necessary to enable spread and scale. This commentary argues that pan-Canadian health data ecosystems are foundational to scaling innovation. By prioritizing data liquidity, real-world evidence generation and data stewardship, Canada can transform its "perpetual pilot projects" into a learning health system that accelerates the scale and spread of value-based innovations.

It has been 10 years since the Advisory Panel on Healthcare Innovation Report (Advisory Panel on Healthcare Innovation 2015) recommended patient engagement and empowerment as one action to enhance the quality and sustainability of healthcare in Canada. Since that time, patient engagement has become internationally recognized as a key component toward improving healthcare systems. In this article, the author highlights how organizations across Canada have engaged patients in healthcare and health research planning, design and governance activities, and discusses three key areas wherein improvements are needed to leverage the potential of patient engagement: leadership and infrastructure, diversity and representation and power structures/imbalances.