SE Health

SE Health traces to 1908, when four visiting nurses in downtown Toronto founded the Saint Elizabeth Visiting Nurses Association to care for the poor, and for new mothers and babies. It is now a national not-for-profit social enterprise headquartered in Markham, working with governments, hospitals, health authorities and families on home care, seniors' living and caregiving. On its 110th anniversary in September 2018 the organisation reported 9,000 health professionals and 20,000 care exchanges a day — 50 million over the previous decade and 144 per cent growth across those ten years — under Shirlee Sharkey, chief executive since 1992. Zayna Khayat took the HealthTO stage in April 2018, two months into a role as the organisation's futurist, to make the case that the future of health care is the home: hospitals, she argued, will one day look the way retail bank branches or travel agents do now. She placed her team's work in the second and third horizons — business models that get paid differently or bring in wholly new capabilities, and markets nobody has imagined yet — on the argument that an ageing population will create categories that do not exist, the way baby food and suburbs did not exist before the boomers.