Mohit Arora

The decisions that shape health care in Canada were not made by the people who depend on it most. That isn’t an accusation — it’s a design condition. What gets measured, what counts as an outcome, who has standing to name harm when it happens: those choices were made before most patients arrived in the room, and the rooms were arranged accordingly.

I’ve been navigating Canada’s healthcare system as a long-term patient. The work I do now is a direct extension of that: I want the people most affected by health systems to have real authority in shaping them — not just a seat at a table that was set without them.

I’m Board Chair at the Toronto Western Family Health Team, a board member at Liver Canada, and on the Scientific Advisory Board at EqHS. I’m a patient partner at University Health Network on data governance and the UHN website redesign, and a member of AFHTO’s Leadership Advisory Council.

Twenty years in brand strategy — running Full Culture, working with organizations navigating cultural change — taught me that the gap between what an institution says it values and what it actually does is always visible, once you know how to read it. In healthcare, that gap has consequences.

I write about AI in Canadian healthcare, patient data rights, health equity, and what it looks like when lived experience is treated as expertise rather than testimony. If you want to connect, reach me on LinkedIn or at [email protected].

Despite the fact that I’ve been blogging before the word ‘blog’ even existed, I’ve never felt comfortable writing an about page. It just feels awkward. I recognize its importance though, so in the interest of including something here, I’ve decided to dictate this page to keep it more conversational.

so I’ve been a patient in the Canadian healthcare system for over 40 years at this point it might sound like a heavy thing to just drop into a conversation but it’s really not. It’s just the reality of how my life has worked out when you’ve been inside a system for that long you begin to understand how the gears turn into continue to see the same patterns play out over and over again. At some point, you realize you’ve accidentally become an expert at something that nobody even recognizes as expertise. I’ve also ended up sitting on many healthcare boards/advisories, which gives you a completely different view of the same system. You hear the thoughts of the people making decisions and get to understand their own experiences or even if they’ve ever experienced the receiving end of the decisions that they are making. It gives you a completely different view of the same system, but you also notice and this is the part that’s difficult to un see once you’ve seen it that a lot of people in those rooms have never actually been on the receiving end of what they’re overseeing. And I don’t just mean that as some grand indictment it’s just a thing that’s true and it definitely changes the way you engage when you happen to be someone who spent his whole life on that receiving end. I know that sounds like a weird detour, but I should mention that I’ve also spent my career in a completely different industry. I spent many years working in the music industry and running my own marketing firm. On the surface this probably seems like it has nothing to do with healthcare, but I’d argue that it has more relevancy than most would assume. The core of that work is about figuring out how to connect a community of people with either an artist a product a brand, etc it’s about connecting to parties together. It’s about understanding what one party wants or needs, and what one party is offering. It’s about finding the bridge between the two and developing a bond to make that relationship long-term and not transactional. When you’ve done it enough times you begin to see that relational connection everywhere. And it’s especially true in healthcare. Patients need one thing and our healthcare systems offer potential solutions, but that relation between the two suffers when the system doesn’t understand what the patient needs or doesn’t even realize that the way that they are offering it is in a way that the patient cannot access it. Right now every health care organization in the country is tripping over its feet while rushing to adopt AI and making sure to tell everyone that patients are at the centre of the process, when in reality, it’s their current understanding of patients that’s in focus, not actual patients. AI in healthcare, but patient engagement looks like when it’s real versus when it’s performance, health equity, governance, racial and ethnic disparities, basically all the places where they stated intention and live experience don’t quite lineup… that’s the space where I live.