Health Tech · AI Strategy · Digital Health

Where clinical depth
meets strategic clarity.

Borealis Health Partners advises health systems and health tech startups navigating AI strategy, digital transformation, and the complex realities of building and buying in healthcare. Senior counsel — not a deck factory. A thinking partner with skin in the outcome.

29yr Domain experience
4 PACS platforms built
70+ Countries deployed
50+ AI deployments
What we do

Advisory built for the complexity of healthcare AI

Two engagement models. Both grounded in 29 years operating at the frontier of health technology — not observing it from a distance.

Health System Advisory

Strategic counsel for mid-to-large health systems, regional imaging networks, and diagnostic centres navigating the transition to cloud-native PACS and AI-integrated workflows. The work is specific: vendor selection, RFP architecture, clinical change management, and building the internal case for technology investment — using health economics frameworks that procurement committees actually respect.

  • Cloud PACS strategy, vendor evaluation, and selection support
  • AI adoption roadmaps grounded in clinical workflow reality
  • Value-based health economics analysis (QALY, CADTH, ICER)
  • Procurement architecture and RFP design
  • Clinical change management and radiologist engagement strategy
  • Infrastructure readiness assessment for AI deployment
Primary: Canada  ·  Secondary: US health systems

Health Tech Startup Advisory

Senior product, strategy, and go-to-market partnership for early-to-growth stage companies building across healthcare AI, digital health, and clinical technology. The gap most founders hit isn't the technology — it's the translation layer between clinical evidence, regulatory reality, and how health systems actually buy. That translation is the work.

  • Product strategy and clinical use case prioritization
  • Regulatory pathway navigation (Health Canada SaMD, FDA 510(k))
  • Market sizing, commercial segment analysis, and GTM architecture
  • Health system sales strategy — who decides, what they need to see
  • Physician advisory board formation and clinical validation design
  • Pricing model development grounded in health system budget structures
Market: Canada · US · North America startup advisory
Why now

The time for healthcare innovation is now.

The conditions that enable meaningful change in healthcare have rarely aligned like this. Not because of AI alone — but because structural pressure, collapsing technology costs, and a genuine shift in what health systems are willing to do have converged at once. Understanding this moment is the difference between leading the transition and managing its aftermath.

Adoption curve

Crossing the chasm — but not where you think

Healthcare AI as a category is not at the top of the hype curve. For SaMD pixel applications — AI that reads images, flags findings, and supports clinical decisions — the market is in the process of crossing the chasm right now. Early adopters have proven it works. The early majority is beginning to move. This is not the peak; it is the inflection.

That distinction matters enormously for strategy. Organizations that treat this as a mature market will under-invest. Those that treat it as still experimental will miss the window where standards, vendor relationships, and workflow integrations get locked in. The right posture is neither — it is deliberate, evidence-grounded engagement at the moment the market is actually at.

The new math of AI
$30 → $0.15 GPT-4 equivalent cost per million tokens, 2023 → 2025

This will move faster than any curve in human history

AI capability and cost are not following Moore’s Law. They are moving faster — by an order of magnitude — than any technology transition we have ever seen. Use cases that were cost-prohibitive in 2022 are fully viable today. The ROI analysis you ran two years ago is wrong. Re-run it.

The strategic implication is not “AI is coming.” It is this: the organizations that begin adapting their workflows, data infrastructure, and clinical culture now will compound that advantage year over year as capability continues to accelerate. The ones that wait for certainty will not be catching up — they will be starting from zero against competitors who have been building for years. There is no safe moment to stand still.

The structural catalyst
Demographic Pressure
Volume ↑ Specialists flat
Canada’s radiologist pipeline can’t keep up with an aging population. Imaging volumes rise. Read times stretch. No hiring wave closes a structural gap — workflow AI does.
Productivity Crisis
#Last in OECD
14 of 16 consecutive quarters of negative productivity growth. Federal policy has made this a political priority. AI-enabled efficiency is now a budget argument, not just a clinical one.
Cost Pressure
Spend ↑ Budgets flat
Per-capita spend outpaces provincial budgets. The ROI case for AI can be made rigorously — using CADTH-aligned health economics that funders recognize and approve.
The question is no longer whether to engage with healthcare AI — it is whether your organization is building the internal capacity to lead that transition or waiting to react to it.
The pattern of failure

Big tech keeps getting healthcare wrong. The pattern is consistent.

Microsoft HealthVault. Google Health — twice. IBM Watson Health. Haven. Oracle and Cerner. Six high-profile failures across two decades, each with access to unlimited capital and world-class engineering talent. The common thread was never the technology. It was a fundamental underestimation of what healthcare actually requires: simultaneous fluency in clinical trust, regulatory complexity, and the slow, procurement-driven reality of health system sales cycles.

The organizations that succeed in this market are the ones that understand it from the inside. That understanding is not available off the shelf.

IBM Watson Health Acquired Merge Healthcare for $1B in 2015. Sold imaging assets six years later. Underestimated clinical workflow complexity at every layer.
Google Health (1.0 & 2.0) Two separate attempts, 2008–2012 and 2018–2021. ~570 staff redistributed. Division dissolved. Consumer UX thinking collided with clinical reality.
Haven (Amazon · JPMorgan · Berkshire) Three of the world's most powerful organizations. Disbanded in three years. Misaligned incentives proved more durable than combined market cap.
Oracle + Cerner $22B acquisition in 2022. Lost 57 hospital customers. Still exploring exit. Enterprise healthcare is not an enterprise software problem.
About

Three domains. Simultaneously. That's the rarity.

Most consultants are deep in one domain. Occasionally two. Meaningful innovation in healthcare requires perfection across all three — at the same time.

Three overlapping domains diagram showing Clinical, Technology, and Business with 29 years at the intersection
29 years at the intersection of all three. The vantage point that cannot be hired, assembled from parts, or replicated by someone who has only observed this industry from the outside.
Work with Stephen
Stephen — founder of Borealis Health
2022 — Present
Director, Innovation & Strategy
Sectra
Leading AI strategy and innovation at one of the world’s most trusted medical imaging companies — a global leader in enterprise imaging across radiology, pathology, and orthopaedics. Responsible for translating emerging AI capabilities into clinical and commercial strategy across a global customer base. Instrumental in winning Sectra’s largest customer to date: Santé Québec — a province-wide enterprise PACS deployment covering the entire Quebec health system, a scale of enterprise imaging not seen anywhere in the world. Working directly with Santé Québec physicians to lead research and clinical innovation for AI adoption at provincial scale.
2020 — 2022
Senior Director, Product
Arterys (acq. by Tempus)
Tripled the addressable market through strategic repositioning. Worked directly alongside founders Albert Hsiao and John Axerio-Cilies and a world-class leadership team — an environment that sharpened thinking on what rigorous AI product development actually requires. Led a talented group of product managers and data scientists in expanding the clinical AI suite from its cardiac foundation into MSK, Neuro, and Oncology — bringing applications to market from a pipeline of 200+ in under 6 months. Assembled and led a clinical advisory board spanning multiple physician specialties. Designed a next-generation AI-first UX that improved radiologist productivity 2–3×. Arterys holds a unique place in the history of medical AI: the company launched the first-ever commercially approved pixel-level AI SaMD — the foundational milestone for an entire category. A decade of cloud-native architecture before most vendors had even started the conversation. This was my first hands-on immersion in a truly cloud-native stack — and the sophistication of that architecture, including the ability to aggregate user and productivity insights at a scale no other vendor in the market has matched, remains the benchmark. It shaped how I think about what serious cloud-native health technology actually looks like versus what is simply marketed as such.
2018 — 2020
Senior Solution Manager, Enterprise Imaging
Change Healthcare
Led the strategic and cultural shift from departmental PACS positioning to enterprise health system strategy — reorienting product narrative, sales motion, and executive relationships toward the C-suite. Foundational leader for Stratus, a new cloud-native medical imaging platform built on Google Cloud — influenced the architecture and direction from the ground up. Led build-vs-buy evaluations that resulted in the acquisition of Nucleus.io, a cloud-native viewer technology stack. Commissioned a multi-year, 60-practice study across 30 IDNs and 30 independent practices that became the definitive clinical evidence and go-to-market foundation — and where the operating principle of trusting data over assumption was forged. Represented the company directly with health system and hospital leadership across the US: managing damaged relationships, rebuilding trust, and leading onsite commercial teams during strategic tender processes.
2002 — 2018
Product & Marketing Leadership
Agfa HealthCare
Rose from Product Manager to Senior Global Marketing Manager over 16 years, managing IMPAX — a $693M revenue PACS platform — across 70+ countries. Led R&D groups as large as 200 people. This is where thousands of hours were invested alongside physicians across specialties — getting inside their heads, understanding clinical workflow at the level of individual keystrokes and cognitive load, and translating that directly into product decisions with large R&D teams. Very few people in health IT have accumulated this depth of clinical proximity. It is the foundation that makes every subsequent role possible. Executed one of health IT’s most significant product turnarounds: stepped in after a year of failed leadership, a programme running 12 months over schedule with no end in sight, and a company that had missed revenues by €170M. Delivered the release. Led GTM strategy and won marquee accounts including Stanford Medicine, Mayo Clinic, and Northwestern Medicine.
1997 — 2002
Integration Specialist & Project Manager
Mitra Imaging
First professional role in health tech, following co-op experience including clinical work at McMaster University Medical Centre in Hamilton. Mitra Imaging was ground zero for radiology’s shift from film to digital — and where a deep education in healthcare interoperability began. Grew up professionally under the leadership of Eric L. Peterson (C.M., Order of Canada) and a team of people who went on to do remarkable things in health and beyond. That environment — intellectually rigorous, mission-driven, world-class — shaped everything that followed and remains the single most formative chapter of the career. Relocated to Eindhoven, Netherlands for a year to build and lead Mitra’s European operations from the ground up — first real exposure to building and selling into global markets. This established an orientation that has defined every role since: building product for the world, not just the market where you happen to sit. A particular focus on the US market, where early adoption of healthcare innovation consistently happens first — making it the critical proving ground for any serious health technology strategy. Built foundational fluency in HL7, DICOM, and HIS-to-modality integration.
MBA Queen's University
Value-Based Healthcare Harvard Business School
Applied Generative AI MIT Professional Education
Executive Education Stockholm School of Economics
Get in touch

Ready to build something important?

Whether you're a health system evaluating your next imaging platform, a CMIO building the case for AI investment, or a founder navigating the gap between clinical validation and commercial traction — let's find out if we're a fit. Conversations are confidential and without obligation.

stephen@borealishealth.ai
Waterloo, Ontario · Serving Canada & North America