In this exclusive interview with CanadianSME Small Business Magazine, Chirag Jadhwani, Founder and CEO of PeerSupport.io, discusses how his AI-driven Spotlight platform is transforming healthcare. Inspired by a personal loss, Chirag created a solution that automates and streamlines referrals, reduces wait times, and alleviates clinician burnout. He shares insights on growing a health tech company from the ground up, the importance of feedback from frontline workers, and the challenges of scaling in Canada’s healthcare system. Discover how PeerSupport.io is making a real difference for patients and healthcare professionals.
Jadhwani is the founder and CEO of PeerSupport.io, a pioneering Canadian health tech company transforming patient care with AI-driven solutions. His journey began in the Yukon, where he left a promising career to tackle one of healthcare’s toughest challenges: reducing clinician burnout and improving patient outcomes. Inspired by the loss of a family member to an inefficient healthcare system, Chirag set out to build technology that lightens the load for overburdened healthcare professionals.
PeerSupport.io’s Spotlight platform uses AI to automate and streamline healthcare referrals, significantly reducing wait times and administrative burden. What inspired you to focus on solving this specific challenge in primary care?
The inspiration came from a personal place. I lost a family member following delays in the healthcare system. I started PeerSupport.io because I wanted to make a difference on the frontlines of care. Referrals are a quiet bottleneck in healthcare. They seem small, but they trigger everything downstream: diagnoses, treatment, recovery. If a referral gets delayed, care gets delayed. So I built Spotlight to do the heavy lifting behind the scenes, including automating referral forms, triaging patients so they’re instantly matched to the right care, and helping clinicians spend less time on paperwork and more time with patients. That was the starting point, and it’s remained our north star ever since.
Your team includes clinicians, engineers, and operators who have firsthand experience with the healthcare system. How has this multidisciplinary approach shaped the development and success of Spotlight?
Spotlight wouldn’t exist without the team behind it. From day one, I surrounded myself with people who understood both care and tech. Our team and collaborators include engineers who’ve built electronic medical records systems (EMRs), nurses who’ve worked in overburdened clinics, and operations leads who know how to scale sensitive systems. Their lived experience helped us design Spotlight not as a product to“replace human decision-making, but as a tool that supports it. When our triage model ranks a referral or completes a form, it’s been shaped by real frontline feedback. Our engineers have sat in clinics. Our clinicians test and retest every feature. That level of care and trust across disciplines is what lets us move fast and effectively.
Spotlight reportedly reduces provider administrative stress by 93% and cuts patient wait times by up to 27 weeks. Can you share some real-world examples of how these improvements have impacted healthcare providers and patients?
Absolutely. What we’re seeing with Spotlight is that it’s taking a lot of the guesswork and busywork out of referrals, which is a big deal for frontline staff.
Before, providers were spending close to 20 minutes per referral, often digging through multiple systems to piece together the patient’s medical history or trying to track down forms and filling them out. Now it’s under 2 minutes. One nurse told us she used to skip referrals on busy shifts because she just didn’t have the time or wasn’t sure if the service was even taking new clients. With Spotlight, she said, “I actually got to send people help I would’ve otherwise let go.”
We also saw a huge drop in stress levels related to admin tasks — from 8.4 to 0.6 on a 10-point scale — just from removing that friction.
On the patient side, the impact’s just as real. For high-demand services like housing or addictions support, wait times dropped by 22 to 27 weeks. In one case, Spotlight flagged a cancellation for a detox bed — and a patient who called in that same week was able to get in right away since they were flagged acute. That just wouldn’t have happened before.
We’re working with our customer to share the full pilot report, but those are a few concrete examples of how this is making care faster, fairer, and less stressful for everyone involved.
As a Yukon-founded company, PeerSupport.io has benefited from local innovation programs and government support. How has the Yukon ecosystem influenced your growth and vision for scaling nationally across Canada?
Yukon is where we proved that small teams can make big systems better, but our story actually started in Ontario, where we first began building and testing Spotlight with frontline providers. What Yukon gave us was a solid base: early government innovation funding, local pilots, and angel investors who believed in the vision. That support helped de-risk development and gave us room to grow.
Now working for the Yukon Government Health Department, one thing that stands out is how fast and personal the feedback loop is. You can call up a clinic director, hear exactly how something’s working, and make changes that same week. That kind of agility gave us the confidence to scale. Today, we’re running projects in British Columbia, Ontario, and Nova Scotia, but the roots of our approach, and a lot of what shaped our values, come from our roots in the Yukon.
Looking ahead, what advice would you give to other small and medium-sized businesses in the health tech space aiming to create meaningful impact while navigating complex healthcare environments?
Build something real before you build something big. The health system needs tools for the heaviness of daily care. My advice is to get close to the problem. Sit in waiting rooms. Watch providers work. Ask what’s breaking. Then build with them. Second, stay grounded financially. We bootstrapped through grants, customers, and angel investors before raising outside capital. That discipline helped us grow sustainably. Finally, don’t shy away from complexity. If you’re solving something truly meaningful in health tech, it will be hard. Stay close to your users, stay honest about outcomes, and stay committed to making it better.
