Founded right in Medicine Hat, VirtuClinic and the new Digital Health Advisor aim toward a simple yet vital goal; a more accessible, sustainable health-care system for all, regardless of location.
The founder of VirtuClinic, Matthew Jubelius, is a registered nurse who started his career at the cardiovascular intensive care unit at the University of Alberta. Over the course of his career, he noticed a recurring issue, in that patients often had not seen a primary care provider in years due to a lack of practitioners accepting new patients.
“So in 2022, I said, OK, like let’s look at what it really looks like to start a clinic,” said Jubelius.
VirtuClinic is a nurse practitioner lead clinic. It maintains all the same abilities as any practitioner clinic, with the bonus of being accessible to anyone in Alberta with an internet connection.
The service operates with NPs from across the province, and intentionally so, as to allow those receiving care to better help patients connect to different community resources, part of a more holistic model of care that looks into all the different contributing factors.
“With nursing, it looks at the person in more complex levels, whether it’s socioeconomic status, if they’re in a safe relationship, just going beyond that diagnosis,” said Jubelius. “By having nurse practitioners in all areas of the province, then we’re able to tap into the patient’s local network, really trying to look at it from a huge system approach.”
The clinic was recognized by the ASTech awards for the first time in 2023 for its innovative work in health care. Jubelius says while it was good to receive the recognition and to platform what they have to offer, it was far from why he and his team do it. That being said, the clinic is also a finalist for the 2026 ASTech Awards.
Jubelius has shifted some of his focus from primary care into employee health and corporate wellness, seeing an opportunity to reach people who might otherwise lack access through the organizations they work for and provide more personalized, private comprehensive care than they may be able to get through telehealth or other contract services.
The next major shift, for Jubelius, would come with the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I went back to the front lines to help out in COVID, and I saw that organizations weren’t necessarily taking care of their most valuable asset-people,” said Jubelius. “At the time, I predicted that due to culture, health-care workers, primarily nurses, there’s going to be a mass exodus of healthcare professionals in probably about three to four years, and I was right.”
Seeing the human resources issue compelled Jubelius to find a new, effective solution and it led him to work with who is now his chief technology officer to create VirtuAdvisor, or their Digital Health Advisors.
The adviser uses AI technology and clinical design to provide assessment, triage, health advice and community support navigation. With the health-care system being so fragmented, says Jubelius, this aims to create fewer opportunities to “drop the ball” and leave a prospective patient unsure of where to go.
“You just log in and you talk, and it’s 100 per cent private,” said Jubelius. “We’ve mitigated or eliminated any risk of personal health information; I see that a lot of people are putting, you know, they’re putting really sensitive health information into like ChatGPT, but then what happens to your data?”
He says no data is captured through the technology, and it is compliant with all health legislation across Canada.
The Digital Health Advisor determines if something can be handled at home, or if a patient may need in-person or urgent care.
This, says Jubelius, aims to both reduce uncertainty for patients and take strain off of health-care workers by reducing the number of unnecessary emergency room visits.
“We’re seeing mental health resources defunded or funding scaled back, we are seeing less physicians taking patients. Where do people go? So they either go to a walking clinic or emergency room, which is overloaded,” said Jubelius. “But we’re still filtering people that don’t need to be in an emergency department into an emergency department because we’re not asking the right questions. VirtuAdvisor is realigning invisibly, getting people to the right access point of the care system.”
This has proven to be a significant win for all involved, as Jubelius has been able to validate through a project with Alberta Innovates that each interaction with VirtuAdvisor saves an average of 4.6 hours of time which would be otherwise spent waiting.
These interactions allowed people to return to work sooner, reclaiming productivity and money they may have lost calling out for a day, and in some cases prevented greater health crises down the line.
“Once you hit a crisis, you’re absent from work, you might have a WCB claim, there’s so so many things downstream,” said Jubelius. “In effect, what VirtuClinic and VirtuAdvisor do is we eliminate these downstream costs.”
It is his hope that VirtuAdvisor could see greater adoption by the province’s health-care system or primary care networks to support the general public.Copyright 2026, Medicine Hat News. All rights reserved.
Anna Smith, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Medicine Hat News.