Meet Anu: Building Connections to Drive Health Care Innovation

When Anu talks about health care, he doesn’t start with technology, business development strategies or sales targets. He starts with people.  

A seasoned health care leader with nearly two decades of experience across Western Canada, Anu recently joined Elevare Health and PHC Ventures as Senior Business Development Manager. Throughout his career, he has worked with health care organizations across acute care, long-term care and home care settings, helping connect people with solutions that improve care delivery and patient outcomes.  

But long before he entered the health care sector, Anu was learning about entrepreneurship from a much earlier source: his family.  

“My parents owned small businesses when I was growing up,” he says. “I spent weekends stocking shelves, loading magazines and helping wherever I was needed. Watching how hard they worked taught me a lot about responsibility, perseverance and what it means to build something from the ground up.”  

That entrepreneurial spirit has remained a constant throughout his career. While earning degrees in business and financial planning, he developed a passion for identifying opportunities, improving processes and finding new ways to solve challenges. Eventually, however, a personal experience led him toward health care.  

After his parents were involved in a serious car accident, Anu spent months supporting his mother’s recovery and witnessed firsthand the impact health care professionals can have on patients and families.  

“Seeing the care, rehabilitation and support that helped my mother recover really changed my perspective,” he says. “It reinforced my desire to be part of something that makes a real difference in people’s lives.”  

That experience helped steer him toward a career in health care, where he has since worked extensively with health systems and providers throughout Western Canada, including rural, remote and northern communities.  

Now at Elevare Health and PHC Ventures, Anu is looking forward to helping bridge the gap between innovative ideas and real-world implementation. For him, health care innovation is not simply about developing new technologies. It’s about ensuring promising ideas can be validated, scaled and integrated into care settings where they can make a meaningful impact. 

In his new role, Anu will focus on building relationships with health care organizations, industry partners, innovators and decision-makers, helping connect promising solutions with the people and systems that can bring them to life. Drawing on nearly two decades of experience and an extensive network across Western Canada, he sees partnership-building as a critical part of turning innovation into impact.  

“I’ve always believed that strong relationships are at the centre of everything,” he says. “When you spend time listening to people, understanding their needs and working collaboratively, that’s when great things happen.”  

What attracted him to PHC Ventures was not only its focus on health care innovation, but also its unique role within the health care ecosystem. As Canada’s only hospital-linked venture fund, the organization helps bridge the gap between innovation and adoption through clinical expertise, strategic partnerships and direct connections into the health care system. Combined with Elevare Health’s ability to design, build and deploy health care technology in real-world settings, Anu saw an opportunity to contribute to innovation in a practical and meaningful way.  

He was equally drawn to the team’s entrepreneurial mindset and willingness to explore new ideas. 

“There’s an entrepreneurial energy here that really excites me,” he says. “It’s an environment where people are encouraged to think differently, collaborate and continuously look for better ways of doing things.”  

As he settles into the role, Anu is eager to connect with colleagues, health care partners and innovators across the sector. Whether he’s meeting with health care leaders, exploring new partnership opportunities or helping bring emerging solutions into practice, he sees every conversation as an opportunity to learn, collaborate and create value.  

For Anu, the future of health care will be shaped not only by great ideas, but by the relationships, trust and collaboration needed to turn those ideas into real-world impact. And he’s looking forward to helping make those connections happen.