The Human Puzzle: Building Interdisciplinary Pipelines for Digital Health Innovation

Canada's healthcare system is moving toward digital transformation, but progress is slowed by persistent silos between clinical research, frontline practice, entrepreneurship, and policy. Global strategies emphasize that governance, equity, and workforce capacity are just as important as technology. In Canada, national reports highlight the need for integrated data sharing across regions and sectors. This paper presents an early case study of The Human Puzzle, a grassroots initiative launched in 2025 by an undergraduate student in applied mathematics. What began as a small experiment convening students, researchers, clinicians, and entrepreneurs revealed both the strong demand for cross-disciplinary spaces and the gaps in existing training and career pathways.. Two inaugural events, Biology Meets AI (125 participants) and Sensors, Structures, and Systems (115 participants with a 60-person waitlist), confirmed this need. The conversations sparked during and after these events shaped the initiative's next stage: mentorship pipelines, applied skills workshops, hackathons, and incubation supports. These grassroots pilots are not a substitute for system-level reform, but they generate early evidence about how bottom-up energy can complement national efforts. By testing collaborative models at a small scale, The Human Puzzle contributes to the broader movement from silos to synergy in digital health.