Making the call: NL company's innovative phone platform facilitating health care journeys

Making phone calls seems to be a fading trend, especially with the advent of artificial intelligence, but one Newfoundland and Labrador company has found a way to keep them relevant.

Ironically, an innovation developed by St. John’s-based Carrick Health Innovations Inc. harnesses the power of AI to make health-related phone calls more efficient and effective.

In the health-care field, phone calls are still a way for organizations to manage communication with patients and vice versa, especially with many people still hesitant to use digital portals, apps and logins to access care.

Handling phone calls can be a heavy burden on those working in the health-care field, so Josh Taylor — Carrick’s chief executive officer — developed a phone platform featuring an AI agent that’s fully linked to patients’ records.

The technology seamlessly tracks and transcribes phone calls, follows up with patients and handles many inquiries without having to involve staff members, unless necessary.

The system was advanced with the help of the expertise of post-secondary students at the College of North Atlantic (CNA) through an internship program by Mitacs, a leading national innovation organization that connects businesses with access to highly skilled talent, financial support, and the partnerships needed to turn ideas into impactful innovations.

Scott Adams, a fourth-year student in CNA’s software developer program, participated in the Mitacs program by testing and deploying the phone system, which was rolled out in the spring of 2026 and is being used by NL Health Services’ cancer pre-screening program.

Taylor was impressed enough to offer Adams a full-time position at Carrick once he graduates in the spring of 2027.

“At a time when we need to harness the potential of AI to build a stronger Canadian economy, the collaboration between Mitacs and Carrick demonstrates what’s possible when we invest in ideas and connect industry with young, highly skilled talent,” said Dr. Stephen Lucas, chief executive officer of Mitacs.

Postmedia recently asked Taylor about the story behind Carrick Health Innovations and what the future has in store for its technology.

Q: Who is Josh Taylor? Tell me about where you grew up, your education and your career path.

A: I was born and raised in Grand Falls-Windsor, NL. I left the province for university, completing a Bachelor of Science at Mount Allison University in 2001, studying mathematics, physics and computer science, followed by a master’s degree in mathematics from the University of Waterloo in 2003. Later, after spending several years working and living overseas, I completed an MBA in finance from the University of Manchester in 2011.

After university, I initially worked as a computer programmer before moving into consulting. I spent a number of years living and working in Europe, particularly in England and Ireland. When I eventually moved home to Newfoundland and Labrador, my career became a mix of technology, business and education. I worked as a university lecturer teaching IT strategy and taught computer programming at College of the North Atlantic. At the same time, I ran a consulting company and was involved in various IT businesses before eventually starting what would become Carrick Health Innovations.

Carrick is really where all of those different parts of my background have come together — technology, problem solving, business and education. And it’s particularly rewarding to be building the company here in Newfoundland and Labrador, with the ambition of developing technology here that can ultimately have an impact well beyond the province.

Q: What is the story of Carrick Health Innovations?

A: Carrick Health Innovations began as TxtSquad, with a fairly simple idea: health-care organizations needed a better way to communicate with patients.

Health care still relies enormously on the telephone. Patients spend time on hold, staff spend hours returning voicemail, and important communications get missed. At the same time, many of the technology solutions intended to replace the telephone — patient portals and apps, for example — require patients to download something, remember passwords or change their behaviour.

We started by addressing that problem through two-way SMS because virtually everyone already knows how to use text messaging. Our work with Newfoundland and Labrador Health Services allowed us to see the problem much more broadly. Today, our technology is being used across dozens of clinics and programs, from primary and urgent care to specialty clinics and provincial cancer-screening programs.

As we grew, we realized that text messaging was only one part of the problem. The telephone itself needed to become much smarter. That has led Carrick toward what we are today: a patient-engagement company building AI, messaging and telephone technology specifically for health-care.

Q: What is the AI phone platform your company has developed?

A: We’re developing an AI-powered telephone platform designed specifically around the way health-care organizations communicate with patients.

Instead of a patient calling a clinic, navigating a complicated phone tree, waiting on hold or leaving a voicemail, an AI agent can answer the call and have a natural conversation with them. Depending on how the health-care organization configures it, the system can help determine why the patient is calling, answer appropriate questions, collect information, route calls, assist with appointments and other routine tasks, or make sure the patient reaches the right person.

The important distinction for us is that we’re not trying to replace health-care professionals. We’re trying to remove the enormous amount of administrative work surrounding health care. If technology can handle routine communication and navigation, staff have more time for the interactions where a human being really is needed.

Q: How did this AI phone innovation come about? What was involved in developing it?

A: AI was really an evolution of what we were already doing rather than a completely new direction for us.

We started with two-way SMS for health care and built a number of automations around it. We also developed our own bots that could prompt patients through different stages of their health-care journey, respond to certain inputs and help automate repetitive interactions.

Then, while we were working through our pilot projects, AI changed dramatically. The emergence of large-scale conversational AI created the opportunity to do things that simply weren’t possible when we started.

Texting was an ideal environment for us to begin introducing more sophisticated AI. It’s conversational by nature, but unlike a live telephone call, the interaction isn’t happening in real time. That gave us an opportunity to introduce AI in a more controlled way, learn how patients responded to it and understand where it could add value.

What became clear very quickly was that both patients and health-care providers were receptive to it. We could also see that automation and AI could handle certain types of patient queries extremely effectively. That saved staff considerable time, reduced delays and, in some cases, helped move patients through their journey more quickly.

So, the need for AI was being demonstrated to us by the health-care professionals we were working with at exactly the same time that the technology was becoming capable enough to address that need.

The natural next step was voice. Telephone communication remains one of the biggest bottlenecks in health care, but applying AI to a real-time phone conversation raises the bar considerably. We have had to think very carefully about the underlying telephone infrastructure, conversational AI, privacy and security, call flows, integrations and, particularly in health care, knowing when the AI should handle something and when a human needs to become involved.

Q: What sort of external help did you get in developing the platform?

A: We’ve been fortunate to have support from organizations that help Canadian companies undertake research and development, and Mitacs has been particularly valuable to us.

We’ve completed two Mitacs-funded internship projects where students from College of the North Atlantic joined Carrick through work terms. They worked directly with our team, primarily testing and configuring various stages of our AI systems. That gave the students an opportunity to work on emerging AI technology in a real-world health-care environment while giving us additional technical capacity as we developed and tested the platform.

Both projects were hugely successful. In fact, in both cases, the students went on to join Carrick as full-time employees after graduation. For me, that’s one of the best outcomes of programs like Mitacs. It didn’t just help us develop the technology — it helped us identify talented people here in Newfoundland and Labrador, give them meaningful experience working on new technology, and ultimately create permanent employment for them.

We’ve also benefited enormously from working directly with people inside the health-care system. Nurses, administrators, managers and other health-care professionals have helped us understand how these systems actually need to work in practice. Some of our most valuable product development has come from listening to the people who deal with these problems every day.

Q: What was the experience like trying to convince NL Health Services to use the technology?

A: Our experience with NL Health Services was excellent. We were fortunate to work initially with people who had a real focus on innovation and the innovation team understood what we were trying to do very quickly.

The more interesting part came as we started engaging stakeholders throughout the health-care system — from patient advocates and frontline staff to practitioners and administrators. There were understandable questions about whether texting was professional enough for health-care, whether patients would actually engage with it, whether people would become overtaxed by communications, and, as we began introducing AI, whether people would be comfortable interacting with it.

What was fascinating was watching some of those concerns turn into light-bulb moments during the stakeholder discussions. People began looking at how they communicated in their own lives. Texting had become one of our primary forms of communication, while health care was still asking patients to use portals that can create friction, or to make telephone calls, wait on hold and wait again for callbacks. Many people simply don’t like communicating that way anymore.

The question gradually became: if this is how we naturally communicate with our families, friends and businesses every day, why wouldn’t we make that same convenient form of communication available in health care?

That stakeholder process ended up being one of the strengths of the project. The people we engaged became champions rather than simply participants. Combined with the innovation talent that already existed within NL Health Services, that allowed the pilot to become successful and ultimately grow well beyond where it started.

Today, Carrick technology is used across approximately 30 clinics and programs within NL Health Services, from primary and urgent care to specialty services and provincial cancer-screening programs.

Q: Did you try to market it to any other agencies/businesses/organizations?

A: Absolutely. In fact, NL Health Services was our first large-scale enterprise health system, but it wasn’t our first experience in health care.

From the beginning, we were selling Carrick into independently owned clinics across Canada and in various parts of the United States. That customer base ranges from individual practitioners and multi-practitioner clinics to organizations operating multiple clinic locations.

We’ve worked across a wide range of health-care settings as well — primary care, specialized medical clinics, mental health, speech clinics, compounding pharmacies and others. Those smaller and medium-sized health-care organizations have been an extremely important part of Carrick’s development.

They put us very close to the front lines of health care. We could see firsthand how staff communicate with patients, where telephone and administrative bottlenecks occur, what patients actually respond to and which technologies genuinely save clinicians and administrative staff time.

So, when the opportunity arose to work with NL Health Services at an enterprise level, we weren’t starting with a theoretical product. We already had a robust customer base of independent clinics that had helped us develop and refine the technology in real health-care environments.

Today, we’re continuing to serve that independent clinic market while also expanding further into larger health-care organizations in Canada and the United States.

Q: How did it come about to be used first in the provincial breast-screening program?

A: The breast-screening program came about quite naturally through the broader work we were already doing with NL Health Services. The innovation team introduced us to the breast-screening team because they were experiencing some of the same challenges we were seeing elsewhere in the system — patient engagement issues, missed appointments and a significant amount of staff time being consumed by administrative processes.

We quickly saw that there was a very good fit. The breast-screening team was excellent to work with and we were able to deploy the technology very quickly.

The results were significant. We were able to reduce no-shows to almost zero, while also reducing the amount of clerical time required to manage screening appointments. We were also able to help streamline the pre-screening process by determining patient eligibility before the appointment.

That meant staff could spend less of their time on scheduling, follow-up and other administrative tasks and more of their time on actually delivering the screening program.

For us, it became a great example of what can happen when technology isn’t introduced simply for the sake of introducing technology. We had a clearly defined operational problem, a health-care team that understood what it wanted to improve and technology that could remove friction for both patients and staff. It also demonstrated how a solution developed in one part of the health-care system could naturally expand into other programs facing many of the same challenges.

Q: Have there been lessons learned from its use in a real-life setting? Do you see ways to build on and improve the technology from that experience?

A: Absolutely. In fact, one of our biggest lessons has been that real-world deployment is where the most important product development happens.

Health care is full of exceptions. A workflow that sounds straightforward on paper becomes much more complicated when you encounter real patients, different clinical circumstances and the day-to-day realities of running a health-care program.

Every deployment teaches us something about where automation works extremely well, where a workflow needs to be more flexible, and where a human needs to enter the process.

That’s also why we see the technology becoming progressively more capable. We’re moving beyond simple communications toward systems that can understand why a patient is contacting the health-care system, help navigate them through the appropriate process and intelligently involve staff when necessary.

The goal isn’t AI for the sake of AI. The measure that matters is whether patients get better access and health-care workers spend less time doing repetitive administrative work.

Q: How does it make you feel to know your innovation is being used to help people navigate their cancer journey?

A: This one is particularly personal for me. My sister is a cancer survivor. About six years ago, she was diagnosed with stage three bowel cancer and went through her treatment here in Newfoundland and Labrador.

She received fantastic care from the health-care professionals at Newfoundland and Labrador Health Services and, thankfully, she was able to navigate the system successfully. But watching her go through it also showed me just how complex the patient journey can be. When someone is already dealing with a cancer diagnosis, there can be an enormous amount to keep track of — appointments, tests, different health-care professionals, different locations and simply understanding what happens next.

My sister was able to manage that complexity, but not everyone is equally able to do so. That experience really brought home to me how important patient navigation is.

So, knowing that technology we’ve built here in Newfoundland and Labrador can now help other people as they go through their own cancer journeys is incredibly fulfilling. If we can make that journey even a little easier — reduce some uncertainty, make it easier to stay connected to their care team or help someone understand what happens next — that’s something I’m very proud of.

Q: Are there any plans to use it elsewhere within NL Health Services or in a sector besides health care? What other applications do you envision?

A: Within NL Health Services, we think the potential applications are very broad. Anywhere patients need to communicate with the health-care system — primary care, specialty clinics, surgery, diagnostic services, screening programs and many others, there is an opportunity to improve that interaction.

The larger vision is that a patient shouldn’t need to understand the organizational structure of health care just to get help. They should be able to call or text, explain what they need in ordinary language and have technology help get them to the appropriate service or person.

Technically, the same technology could certainly be applied outside health care. Any organization with large numbers of inbound calls and complicated workflows could benefit from conversational AI. But health care is where our expertise is, the problems are enormous and the potential impact is significant, so that remains our focus.

Q: Are there any plans for bringing it to Canada or beyond?

A: Absolutely. That’s ultimately the ambition for Carrick.

Newfoundland and Labrador has given us something that is extremely difficult for a young health-care technology company to obtain: the opportunity to develop technology alongside a real health-care system and prove that it can work in real clinical and administrative environments.

We’re now taking what we’ve learned here to health-care organizations elsewhere in Canada and into the United States. The problems we’re solving aren’t unique to Newfoundland and Labrador. Health-care systems everywhere are struggling with access, workforce shortages, administrative burden and outdated communication infrastructure.

There’s something particularly exciting about building this in Newfoundland and Labrador. We’d like Carrick to become an example of a company that can develop health-care technology here, prove it here, employ people here — and then export that technology across Canada and internationally.

We first published our interview with Josh Taylor in our newsletter, FP Atlantic Economic Report. Sign up now to get more exclusive insights into the Atlantic Canadian economy delivered straight to your inbox every Thursday.