Company leader
Duncan Weatherston
Co-founder and CEO
Smile Digital Health
Duncan Weatherston is the co-founder and chief executive of Smile Digital Health, a Toronto, Ontario, company whose FHIR data platform lets health plans and health systems store and share patient records through open standards. He spent more than 25 years in IT before Smile, including work on Ontario's electronic health record services.
Health Records in Ontario
Weatherston built a career across business development, systems integration, software development and support. He worked on the province's electronic health record services, and in 2011 he met James Agnew while both worked on health integration and data repository projects.
Launching Smile CDR
The two launched Smile CDR in 2016 as a product of their first company, Simpatico AI, with plans for artificial intelligence to play a large part. Weatherston came to see that "our main strength was the platform itself", a clinical data repository built on the FHIR standard. The company later took the name Smile Digital Health to reflect that focus.
In 2022 Smile acquired Alphora, a company that builds clinical reasoning tools on the Clinical Quality Language standard. Weatherston argued that "Clinical reasoning integrated with the health data fabric will bring pivotal capabilities to our clients." That work now feeds the digital quality measures Smile runs for health plans.
An Argument for Open Health Data
Weatherston holds that open data will create more value than the silos it replaces. "We think that health information should be free." In his view, Smile's "real competition is the status quo", and he welcomes other startups working on the same fragmentation problem.