In September 2020, I received a phone call from my mother in Mumbai, India, that changed the course of my life. She told me my grandmother, Anju, had suddenly died. I was thousands of kilometres away, working my first job with the Yukon government while completing my computer science degree with the University of British Columbia. It was stable, decent-paying work–planning aviation projects across the territory–and in the midst of the pandemic’s upheaval, it felt like solid ground for a young immigrant to Canada. But the news of my grandmother’s death left me reeling. 

A month earlier, my grandmother had seen her doctor for symptoms related to a pre-existing heart condition, but nothing urgent was flagged. By the time the underlying problem was recognized, it was too late. She had been a steady presence in my childhood home, teaching me the importance of family and community. What stayed with me, though, was how easily such tragedies can happen inside overstretched healthcare systems.

When hospitals are under pressure, nurses juggle patients and paperwork, while doctors carry workloads that make it impossible to give each person the attention they need. In that rush, errors happen. That’s what happened to my grandmother–and what countless families experience across Canada. Between 2024 and 2025, one in 17 acute care hospital stays in Canada involved at least one unintended and preventable harmful event, such as infections, post-surgical complications, or medication errors, affecting 153,000 hospital stays and thousands of patients.

In the early months of the pandemic, I read grim accounts of Canada’s healthcare system overwhelmed by surging patients—some dying alone while workers were pushed beyond their limits. Seeing that, I knew I wanted to leave my work and build something that would give providers what they so often lack: time. That conviction eventually led me to found my company. PeerSupport.io, in 2022, where we use AI-powered software to reduce clinician burnout.

From a young age, I loved math and the way algorithms bring order to chaos. After my grandmother’s death, I started thinking about how those same tools could help solve the healthcare crisis unfolding. I had no experience in health tech, but I understood that time spent navigating outdated software was time taken away from patients. My idea was simple: use AI to automate repetitive, draining tasks to ease overload, reduce delays, and even save lives.

With that goal in mind, I quit my job in 2021, less than a year after starting. I began cold-calling healthcare providers across North America, hoping to shadow staff and  research the tool I wanted to build. Most never replied, and those who did politely declined–until I reached Susan Dobson, the director of the Krasman Centre, a mental health and addictions clinic in York, Toronto. I explained that my goal was to use AI not to replace healthcare workers but to relieve them of the most exhausting parts of their jobs. To my surprise, she didn’t rush me off the phone. Instead, she shared the burnout her staff faced and the turnover it had caused. At the end of the call, she said, “If you’re willing to leave the Yukon, come work with us.”

A few weeks later, I moved to Toronto and joined the Krasman Centre to build new tools and pilot them, earning $1,000 a month. It wasn’t much, but it gave me invaluable access to the healthcare space. I spent my days speaking with clinicians and patients, and observing how much of the staff’s energy was consumed by tasks unrelated to patient care.

I started by tackling the most obvious bottlenecks, shadowing the front-office administrator, who handled up to 70 emails a day from people seeking help. No matter how fast she worked, the backlog never shrank. To help, I built the first version of Spotlight, a triage app that sorted emails by urgency so critical cases could be addressed first. It allowed her to respond within a single system instead of jumping between  email, phone, and the clinic’s internal booking tool–saving her about half an hour each day. 

Building on that early success, I started accompanying frontline staff inside the clinic, in virtual care, and on the street with unhoused clients. I quickly noticed that referrals were the biggest drain on their time. Every client needed connections to specialists, pharmacies, social programs, or community services, and each referral meant  navigating long, often outdated forms. New staff didn’t always know where to send people, while even experienced staff struggled to keep up with constant changes to government programs and services at other centres.

Instead of just streamlining a single inbox, as I had with the first version of Spotlight, I explored reducing  the entire referral process to three clicks on one platform: The first selected the right provider options, the second auto-filled referral forms from existing patient notes, and the third sent everything to the relevant  providers. I landed on a browser extension–an upgraded version of Spotlight that synced directly with electronic medical records, eliminating the need to retype or copy information.

Between 2020 and 2024, I ran six pilots at the Krasman Centre, refining the tool with each iteration. It was an exhausting period of trial and error, made harder by the fact that I was earning just $12,000 a year in one of the world’s most expensive cities. When my savings ran out, I relied on credit cards to get by. Still, seeing clinicians reclaim time with each pilot made every sacrifice worth it.

After the sixth trial, clinicians and administrators were saving up to five hours a week, allowing them to see far more patients daily. Shortly afterwards, I incorporated  PeerSupport.io, offering Spotlight to other organizations. Leveraging connections I had built years earlier, I brought on the Yukon government as a client, and now we’re building sales momentum across North America.

Early in 2025, we began developing a tool to handle all the administrative work clinicians do, such as lab requisitions and patient notes. The result was Peer CoWork, a voice-activated web browser for clinical settings. Clinicians speak into the browser, which automatically records notes, completes forms, and sends emails, while keeping them in control through a review and approval process. That may sound lofty, but I’m always transparent about our technology’s limits. AI can make mistakes, so every action must be reviewed by a human. The technology is meant to assist providers, not replace their judgment. 

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When we introduced Peer CoWork to our existing customers in late 2025, the response was overwhelming. By the end of 2026, our tools will be active across five major healthcare providers in Canada and the U.S., supporting over a million patient files. We’re on track for $5 million in annual revenue, with a team of six full-time employees in Canada. We aim to grow the team to 10 by year’s end.

Looking ahead, we’re focusing on expanding  Peer CoWork to  organizations weighed down by  administrative overload. But when I think about the future, it’s less about products or growth targets than the values that brought me here. My grandmother taught me that ability carries responsibility and that our gifts are meant to serve others. That lesson is the real inheritance she left me–and it’s what motivates me to keep working and saving lives.

–As told to Ali Amad