Dr. Chandi Chandrasena, Chief Medical Officer at OntarioMD, has been thinking a lot about how clinics adopt digital tools. During our conversation at the 2025 OntarioMD Digital Health Conference, she pushed back on the idea that physicians need a fixed playbook. She argued for something more practical.

A flexible framework for digital transformation in primary care

In the opening moments of our discussion, Dr. Chandrasena explained why clinics keep asking for a recipe and why a recipe almost always fails them.

“Everyone thinks: you’ve got your clinic, you’ve got your clinical processes, and then you’ve got a digital health solution,” she said. “The natural assumption is to start integrating them together.”

The real issue, she noted, is that “I can’t give you a recipe because technology is an enabler to the problems you have.” Every clinic has different problems, different workflows, and different levels of readiness.

nstead of a prescriptive playbook, she described a structured toolkit that adapts to context. A new clinic can follow one path. A clinic undergoing a merger will need another. Her analogy summed it up well: “Everyone’s kind of like choosing an adventure, but the adventures are limited by the book.”

Standardization matters. Uniformity doesn’t.

Watch the full video for Dr. Chandresena’s comments about:

• Why AI scribes help, but “you’re not going to open the box and suddenly gain all this time.”
• The coming wave of AI inbox tools and how they could triage reports and clear clinical noise.
• The digital divide created by poor internet access and what real “knowledge translation” looks like for clinics.
• Why she believes digital and health literacy should start early, long before medical school.
• How OntarioMD is trying to prevent inequity as more patient-facing AI enters the market.

This was a wider conversation than I expected. Like many, I assumed a standard playbook might work for physician practices. Dr. Chandrasena made a convincing case that the goal was never a playbook at all.

Learn more about OntarioMD at https://www.ontariomd.ca/

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