This hospital had the longest wait times in Ontario last year. It’s using AI, private donors to speed up care

When Dr. Justin Hall started his 7 a.m. shift in the ER at Toronto's Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre on a recent Wednesday, there were already more than 60 patients waiting.

Sunnybrook is one of the busiest hospitals in Canada, with the country's largest trauma centre and burn centre. 

It also has the distinction of having the longest wait time in Ontario. In 2024, the median length of stay for patients at Sunnybrook was eight hours and 13 minutes.

That means half the patients in Sunnybrook’s emergency department waited even longer, from the moment they first registered to the moment they left.

"It's a big problem,” said Hall, who is Sunnybrook's chief of emergency medicine.

But in July, the hospital started a pilot using artificial intelligence to help speed up service in the ER.

As Hall asks patients to describe their symptoms, an AI-enabled app called DAX Copilot listens in from his pocket and acts as a scribe. The app organizes and summarizes the conversation between doctor and patient.

Physicians are also able to input anything they know about the patient before having the conversation — such as if they had bloodwork or tests done. The doctor reviews the AI-gathered information, which is then transferred to the patient’s file.

Hall said it means doctors spend less time on note-taking and more focusing on people.

“When I see the patient, I can make a decision faster for them, trying to decrease their length of stay here,” Hall explained, noting that he gets the patient's consent before using the AI tool.

Hall said the hospital is currently analyzing how much time the AI trial is saving doctors. But in a document on its website, Sunnybrook says the app will reduce the time physicians spend on manual documentation by an average of seven minutes per encounter.

Hall said it supports “a better patient interaction and decreases some of the cognitive burden [for the doctor] because it's taking away some of that thought process ... we still have to apply our medical knowledge to that, but it does certainly take away a bit of the administrative burden as well.”

Sunnybrook has also been looking beyond technology to find solutions — including using funding from private donors.

When determining how many hours of physician coverage a given hospital receives money for, Ontario’s current funding model doesn't account for the complexity of individual patients' cases.