Logo of Scarborough Centre for Healthy Communities

Scarborough Centre for Healthy Communities

Building Ontario’s First Venture-Enabled Community Health Centre

A healthcare professional using a stethoscope to examine two young girls, one of whom is being held by a woman wearing a niqab, inside a medical clinic. 
ENGAGEMENT

Multi-year partnership. Innovation, digital transformation, and venture building.

sECTOR

Community Healthcare

OVERVIEW

SCHC serves 25,000+ clients annually across one of Ontario's most complex healthcare environments. When we started, innovation at SCHC was ad-hoc and unsustainable. When we finished, SCHC had a governed innovation engine, three production-grade digital systems live across intake, clinical automation, and caregiver training, and its first revenue-generating social enterprise. Grant dependency reduced. Operational friction cut. A repeatable system in place.

staff trained in venture & innovation methods

50+

production-grade digital pilots launched

3

revenue generating social enterprise launched

1

The Problem

SCHC needed to modernize without disrupting frontline care. Reduce administrative burden. Build financial resilience. All inside a highly regulated, resource-constrained environment. The challenge wasn't knowing what to do. It was figuring out how to do it without breaking what was already working.

What We Built

  • We aligned senior leadership around a shared digital and innovation roadmap, supported executive coaching, and led accreditation readiness to ensure innovation efforts were institutionally sound and scalable.

  • We trained 50+ staff through SCHC’s Innovation Champions program and launched an advanced venture-building track for high-potential teams, equipping internal leaders to identify, validate, and scale new solutions from within the system.

  • We designed and implemented SCHC’s end-to-end innovation architecture, enabling ideas to move systematically from exploration to pilot to scale. This included formal governance, decision rights, stage-gated workflows, and SCHC’s organization-wide Innovation Policy.

  • Together, we moved innovation into production through live pilots, including an AI intake chatbot, an AI clinical scribe to reduce clinician admin burden, immersive VR caregiver training, and internal AI tools to support staff navigation and decision-making.

  • We designed, launched, and validated SCHC Shared Services — SCHC’s first revenue-generating venture — securing early customers and proving a sustainable nonprofit enterprise model.

Outcomes

BL built an enterprise-wide innovation engine: governance structures, leadership alignment, and 50+ staff trained to run it.

A diverse group of people attending a presentation in a conference room, with a large screen displaying 'SCHC Innovation Champions' and session details, and a whiteboard on the right side.
Group of diverse adults, smiling and posing together indoors at a community event, with banners for health organizations in the background.
Two women unloading supplies from a medical van outside a modern building.
A diverse group of people posing for a photo in a conference room, some standing and one person kneeling, with tables and office supplies in the foreground.

“Boardroom Labs support developing pilots and ventures across cancer screening and AI has been invaluable. They back our mission to serve marginalized communities without losing sight of what actually works.”

- Callum Tyrrell | Vice President, Integration, Innovation, and Engagement | Scarborough Centre for Healthy Communities

You know something needs to change. Let's figure out what.

Two weeks. No cost, no obligation.

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