Summit Explores how LLMs are Moving from Promise to Practice in Healthcare

On May 12, 2026 the Ottawa Medical AI Research Institute (OMARI) and the CHEO Research Institute hosted the Ottawa Applied Medical AI Summit, with support from TELUS, bringing together leaders from healthcare, research, education and industry to explore how large language models are being developed, evaluated and deployed in medical settings.

Across the program, one message came through clearly: the key challenge is no longer whether LLMs can be useful in healthcare. It is how to move from promising prototypes to tools that are safe, effective, well governed and ready for real-world use. Sessions covered LLM literacy, clinical evaluation, regulatory considerations, ongoing monitoring, patient-facing systems, education and research applications, deployment platforms and responsible scaling.

Summit speakers and attendees
Presenters and participants at the Ottawa Applied Medical AI Summit

Speakers shared practical case studies and lessons from across the Ottawa medical AI community, including tools for surgery preparation, patient education, medical education, pregnancy information, medical school admissions review, retrieval-augmented generation and rapid application development. Participants also discussed the infrastructure, governance, privacy and evaluation practices needed to support responsible adoption.

On the Ottawa Applied Medical AI Summit event page you can find information about the summit, including the full agenda, speakers, as well as details about the venue, TCC Canada in Ottawa.

An event report is now available, along with recordings from the summit. Presentation decks are included in the session descriptions on the Vimeo pages, below each video.

Explore the Summit Materials and Videos