CanHealth’s vision is to bring digital learning to medical students in the poorest countries, with Gross National Income below $ 4,000 per capita. The mission is to use donor funds to subsidise medical education in countries such as Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Peru etc. where there are dire shortages of doctors and nurses, amid rapidly growing populations.

To achieve its mission, CanHealth has partnered with Interactive Health International (IHI), a Canadian company that is a leading provider of a digital health education platform called CyberPatient. Just like trainee pilots learn on a flight simulator, medical students and nurses can learn through CyberPatient, which hosts a virtual hospital with 130 patients, available 24/7.

CanHealth would identify a university in a poor country willing to engage with the CyberPatient learning platform, and determine how many medical students are enrolled. It would then buy the appropriate user licences for those students from IHI at a heavily discounted rate. Those licences would then be provided free of cost to that university. There have been independent research studies that demonstrate superior learning outcomes using CyberPatient as part of the traditional curriculum in a medical school.

The University of British Columbia and Vancouver Coastal Health own 8% of IHI, which has spent six years developing CyberPatient. The company has also signed an MOU with the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada.