PHC Ventures Helps Bring MindfulGarden’s Delirium-Care Technology From Evaluation to Everyday Use at St. Paul’s Hospital
Collaboration between Providence Health Care, PHC Ventures, Innovate BC and MindfulGarden shows how Canadian health innovations can move from real-world evaluation to health-system adoption and investment.
VANCOUVER, B.C. — A made-in-B.C. technology first brought into St. Paul’s Hospital (SPH) for clinical evaluation is now moving into routine patient care, demonstrating a pathway for Canadian health innovations to make the difficult transition from pilot to adoption.
Providence Health Care (PHC) has purchased 2 units from MindfulGarden, an interactive, biofeedback-based technology designed to help calm patients experiencing anxiety, agitation and delirium, for ongoing use in St. Paul’s Hospital’s Cardiac Surgery Intensive Care Unit (CSICU).
The procurement follows a multi-year collaboration involving MindfulGarden, PHC Ventures, Providence clinicians and Innovate BC, through Innovate BC’s Integrated Marketplace program, which helps B.C. companies validate, deploy and scale their innovations while de-risking adoption for industry partners. That collaboration enabled the technology to be evaluated in a real-world clinical environment and build evidence with frontline health care teams. Following that journey, PHC Ventures has also invested in MindfulGarden and will continue to support the Vancouver-based company as it works to expand adoption and scale.
“Too many promising Canadian health technologies struggle to move beyond the pilot stage,” said Brian Simmers, Preisdent of PHC Ventures. “This partnership demonstrates what’s possible when innovators, clinicians, health systems and commercialization partners work together to generate evidence, support adoption and create a pathway to scale.”
From Promising Technology to Clinical Evaluation
PHC Ventures first identified MindfulGarden through Creative Destruction Lab as a promising Canadian health technology with potential relevance to Providence Health Care — the kind of early-stage discovery PHC Ventures is built to make, and the first step in a defined pathway it uses to move innovations from idea to everyday clinical impact.
Through data generated by the Integrated Marketplace, PHC Ventures was able to bring MindfulGarden into Providence for further evaluation and connect the company with Dr. Alana Flexman, an anesthesiologist and researcher at St. Paul’s Hospital whose work focuses on delirium and non-pharmacological interventions.
“Delirium is one of the areas where we really don’t have effective management, so we tend to give drugs,” said Dr. Flexman. “This is a great opportunity to address that gap.”
That collaboration led to a three-month quality improvement evaluation in the CSICU, where clinicians used MindfulGarden with patients experiencing post-operative anxiety, restlessness and mild delirium.
Strong Frontline Support Drove the Decision
The results were decisive. Across 11 clinician interviews, participants consistently described the technology as calming, easy to use and an effective distraction tool, with all 11 expressing a positive perception and interest in continued use. Of 14 completed staff surveys, all respondents said they were satisfied with the technology and would use it again, and 12 recommended it for permanent implementation.
Demand extended beyond the study itself: staff began asking to use the device with patients outside the formal evaluation, requiring the research team to pause broader use until a follow-on study could begin.
“The clearest sign of impact was not a statistic,” according to the evaluation team. “It was that nurses wanted to keep using the technology.”
That frontline enthusiasm, combined with the technology’s ability to operate without EMR integration, dedicated hospital Wi-Fi or the collection of patient health information, supported PHC’s decision to procure two MindfulGarden units for ongoing use at SPH, with delivery expected in September 2026.
An Investment and a Commercialization Partnership
Following the successful evaluation and procurement, PHC Ventures has invested in MindfulGarden and will continue supporting the company’s growth and adoption.
“This wasn’t a decision made because we liked the technology, it was driven by a clear business case,” said Simmers. “Delirium is costly to manage: it’s associated with antipsychotic use, extended length of stay and increased need for one-to-one patient observation. MindfulGarden demonstrated the potential to reduce reliance on all three, while also offering something we don’t have today — a non-pharmacological alternative in a space where medication has been the default. The return on investment and labour savings made this an easy case to support, and it’s exactly the kind of evidence-backed value we look for at PHC Ventures.”
Fraser Health and Royal Columbian Hospital continue their own evaluation of MindfulGarden through the Integrated Marketplace project. “This is exactly the kind of momentum we want to see companies build through the Integrated Marketplace. By working with industry partners to validate their technologies in real-world environments, B.C. innovators can demonstrate value, build credibility and gain the traction they need to reach new customers and scale. Seeing MindfulGarden take that next step shows how demand driven innovation programming can strengthen our health-care system while creating new opportunities for B.C. companies to grow,” said Peter Cowan, President and CEO of Innovate BC.
“St. Paul’s was a natural fit for this early adoption of MindfulGarden,” said Founder & CEO Catherine Winckler. “Not only did we have an incredible clinical champion in Dr. Flexman and an understanding of the business challenges in HealthTech from Brian Simmers and his team, but my connection to the hospital is personal. My colon cancer was spotted early at St. Paul’s and surgery was successful. In recovery, I actually experienced delirium first-hand and it was an invaluable perspective. I called it my best working vacation ever.”
What Comes Next
A separately funded, randomized pilot trial led by Dr. Flexman as Principal Investigator and Dr. Steven Reynolds as Co-Principal Investigator — funded by the Canadian Anesthesiologists’ Society is underway at SPH and expected to conclude in October 2026. The trial is designed to assess how and for whom MindfulGarden works, including its effects on anxiety, delirium onset and medication use.
With the two purchased units now moving into daily clinical use, PHC will also begin tracking device utilization, PRN antipsychotic use, one-to-one observation hours and other operational impacts over the technology’s first six months in service — building an evidence base for wider adoption across the health system.
“We don’t just pilot technologies,” the evaluation summary notes. “We create the conditions for promising innovations to be evaluated, validated, adopted and scaled.”