WELLTRUST: AI and Patient Consent to Reshape Canadian Clinical Trials

VANCOUVER, BC & TORONTO, ON – February 19, 2026 – A new collaboration between two of Canada’s healthcare technology leaders is set to tackle one of the most persistent bottlenecks in medical science: finding the right patients for clinical research. WELL Health Technologies and HEALWELL AI have launched WELLTRUST, a platform that combines a massive clinical network with sophisticated artificial intelligence to accelerate clinical trial recruitment, all built upon a foundation of explicit patient consent.

The initiative aims to bridge the gap between medical innovation and the patients who stand to benefit, creating a more efficient pathway for developing new therapies and diagnostics while navigating the complex ethical landscape of patient data.

The Recruitment Bottleneck: A Long-Standing Challenge in Medicine

For decades, the success of clinical trials—the bedrock of evidence-based medicine—has been hampered by a critical operational hurdle. It is estimated that up to 85% of trials worldwide fail to enroll enough participants on time, leading to costly delays, increased budgets, and, in some cases, the complete abandonment of promising research.

For clinicians and researchers, the process of finding eligible candidates is often a manual, time-consuming effort akin to finding a needle in a haystack. It involves painstakingly reviewing patient records against a long list of complex inclusion and exclusion criteria. This inefficiency not only slows down the pace of discovery but also means many willing patients are never presented with the opportunity to participate. Studies have shown that while a high percentage of patients are open to joining a trial, only a fraction are ever enrolled, often due to a simple lack of connection and awareness.

This challenge has spurred a race to find better solutions, with many turning to technology to streamline the matching process. The WELLTRUST platform enters this arena with a model that directly addresses this fundamental inefficiency.

A Two-Pronged Solution: Scale and Intelligence

The power of WELLTRUST lies in the strategic partnership between WELL Health and HEALWELL AI, each bringing a crucial component to the table.

WELL Health provides the immense scale. As the operator of Canada's largest outpatient clinic network, with over 240 primary care, specialized, and diagnostic clinics, the company facilitates more than four million patient visits annually. This extensive footprint, supporting over 43,000 healthcare providers across Canada and the US, creates an unprecedented pool of potential research participants who are already engaged within a trusted healthcare ecosystem.

HEALWELL AI delivers the intelligence. The platform leverages HEALWELL's proprietary DARWEN™ AI engine, a system with a track record validated by over 40 peer-reviewed publications. The AI is designed to analyze complex health information—with patient consent—to identify "high-fit" individuals for specific trials, particularly those with chronic or rare conditions who are often the most difficult to recruit. By automating this identification process, the platform promises to dramatically reduce the time and resources required to launch and complete clinical studies.

"WELLTRUST embodies our commitment to responsible and impactful AI in healthcare," said Dr. Alexander Dobranowski, President of HEALWELL AI, in the official announcement. "By integrating HEALWELL’s data and AI capabilities directly into WELL’s clinical environment, we are creating an advanced AI powered ethical patient identification and research acceleration platform."

Navigating the Ethical Tightrope: Consent as the Cornerstone

While the promise of AI in healthcare is vast, so are the concerns surrounding data privacy and patient autonomy. The WELLTRUST platform is designed to confront these issues head-on, positioning patient consent not as an afterthought, but as its central operating principle. This "consent-first" framework is critical for compliance with Canada's stringent privacy legislation, including the federal Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and various provincial laws like Ontario's PHIPA.

Under the WELLTRUST model, patients within the WELL network will be given the clear and voluntary choice to opt into the program. By providing their consent, they agree to be contacted about future clinical trial opportunities for which they may be eligible. Crucially, the platform ensures that declining to participate has no impact whatsoever on the patient's ongoing care, a key requirement to ensure participation is free from any form of coercion.

The platform includes what the companies describe as a unified privacy, consent, and data-governance layer, giving patients "clear, flexible, and revocable control" over how their information is used. This approach aligns with the growing sentiment among patient advocacy groups, which support research participation but demand transparency and control.

Dr. Michael Frankel, Chief Medical Officer of WELL Health, added that the platform allows patients to participate in research "in a safe, transparent way." He noted, "WELLTRUST enables partners in the life sciences ecosystem to work with a scalable, consent-driven data infrastructure."

The Canadian Advantage in a Competitive AI Landscape

WELLTRUST is not the only platform using AI to improve trial recruitment. The global market is populated with innovative solutions, including Canadian-grown systems like Horizon Trials and PMATCH, which also use algorithms to connect patients with research opportunities.

However, WELLTRUST's key differentiator may be its deep, structural integration within a single, massive healthcare delivery network. Instead of being a third-party software layer that sits on top of disparate electronic health record systems, it is woven into the fabric of the WELL ecosystem. This direct access, combined with a pre-established relationship of care between patients and their providers in WELL clinics, could foster a higher level of trust and participation.

This integration could give Canada a strategic advantage, positioning the country as a premier destination for ethical and efficient clinical research. By solving the recruitment problem at scale while upholding world-class privacy standards, the collaboration between WELL Health and HEALWELL AI could attract more global pharmaceutical and biotech research investment.

The platform is also designed for the future, with a roadmap that includes supporting other research applications like real-world evidence generation and developing enhanced clinical decision support tools. As it rolls out, WELLTRUST will not only test the power of AI to accelerate science but also the strength of a model built on putting patient empowerment first.