Case Study — Connected Care Halton OHT

Mapping Primary Care Availability Across Halton Region

Across Ontario, Many Residents Do Not Have a Regular Primary Care Provider

Knowing which clinics are accepting patients — and keeping that information current — is an ongoing challenge for Ontario Health Teams. Existing directories often depend on clinics to self-report, and availability can change faster than records are updated.

Connected Care Halton OHT (CCH OHT) worked with DocMaps to take a different approach: proactive, verified outreach. We designed a process that contacted clinics directly through an AI-powered calling agent branded to the OHT, with the results powering the 'Find a Doctor' tool now featured on the CCH OHT website.

Connected Care Halton social media post promoting the Find a Doctor tool to patients

Here's how it worked: DocMaps deployed an AI calling agent that phoned clinics directly to ask a simple set of questions: Are you accepting new patients? How many providers are currently accepting? Roughly how many patients can you take on?

Call

AI agent calls clinics directly

"Are you accepting new patients?"

"How many providers currently accepting?"

"How many patients can you take on?"

Verify

Responses reviewed before publication

Publish

Added to embeddable directory

These data points were co-designed with the CCH OHT team based on what would be most useful for the region. The calling agent was branded to the OHT — when clinics asked who was collecting the data, the agent disclosed it was on behalf of Connected Care Halton. The OHT also supported the outreach with a coordinated communications strategy, which helped drive an 84% call answer rate during coordinated outreach windows across the 4 day campaign.

The result: an embeddable clinic directory deployed on the Connected Care Halton OHT website — giving residents a way to find clinics that may be accepting new patients in their area, as a starting point for contacting clinics directly.

What We Delivered

A verified data export of clinic availability across the Halton region, available to support OHT planning, navigation, and access-related initiatives
An embeddable clinic directory deployed on the CCH OHT website
A co-designed data collection framework tailored to the region’s needs
The pilot demonstrated the feasibility of ongoing data refreshes to keep the directory current

All data reflects clinic-reported, point-in-time information. No patient-level data was collected or processed. This tool does not replace Health Care Connect, 811, or clinical decision-making.

Connected Care Halton social media post showing the interactive clinic directory map

Want to explore this for your OHT?

DocMaps works with Ontario Health Teams to build verified clinic directories tailored to their region. If keeping clinic data current is a challenge for your team, we'd love to learn more about what you're working on.

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