Why Canada’s largest pediatric hospital is betting on artificial intelligence
Why Canada’s largest pediatric hospital is betting on artificial intelligence
Publish Date: 2026-03-05 11:00:00
Source Domain: www.theglobeandmail.com
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SickKids in Toronto has been building AI infrastructure for more than a decade and is now preparing to trial a system that could order diagnostic tests before a physician has seen the patient.THE CANADIAN PRESS/Frank Gunn
It’s lunchtime at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. A child arrives in the emergency department, doubled over in abdominal pain. The standard intake information is collected: vital signs, symptoms, history. An artificial intelligence model assesses the data, flags a high likelihood of appendicitis, and orders an ultrasound.
No waiting for a physician to work through a queue of patients. By the time the child is seen by a doctor, the imaging results are in hand. A same-day surgery is booked, and the child is soon recovering at home.
That future is not far off. This summer, SickKids will launch a trial that brings this scenario closer to reality.
“It represents a massive leap forward in how AI will accelerate patients towards a diagnosis faster,” says Dr. Devin Singh, co-lead of the SickKids’s artificial intelligence service, known as SKAI.
During the first phase of the trial, a trained clinician will review and approve each AI-generated recommendation. The model has been running silently in the background at SickKids for more than 18 months, and the results, Dr. Singh says, are impressive. It’s the culmination of more than five years of development, and a glimpse of what hospital medicine will look like in the decade ahead.
The goal with the trial is to use data captured at triage to anticipate which patients are likely to need particular tests before a physician has formally assessed them.
“Why have a patient sit for four to six hours waiting if we can make this prediction with such great precision?” Dr. Singh says. “Let’s just order the test right away.”
The longer-term vision, once the clinician-review phase is proven safe, is for AI to communicate directly with patients and families to…
