Simon Williams has implemented Canvas at three different healthcare companies. Now CTO of Wisp, he keeps coming back to the only solution that makes sense. He spoke with Canvas CEO Adam Farren at the inaugural BUILD Summit in San Francisco. Read here for more insights from the day.
When you've implemented the same platform at three different healthcare companies, people start to ask questions. For Simon Williams - CTO of Wisp and one of Canvas's most trusted reference calls - the answer is straightforward, even if the path wasn't.
Simon's healthcare journey started in 2015. Since then, he's worked at Lemonaid Health, Patina, and Synapticure before joining Wisp as an advisor in 2024 and stepping into the full-time CTO role in January 2026.
Each company brought different problems, different patient populations, and different operational scales. One thing stayed constant.
Building for consistency — and complexity
At Patina, Simon's team was among the earliest users of Canvas's SDK and plugin framework. The context was value-based care - a model where outcomes aren't just good medicine, they're the entire business model. The goal: ensure every provider delivers the same standard of care consistently.
"We were aiming to provide the same best practice, best outcome - every time," Simon explains. "That was one of the keys to driving down our medical loss ratio." Canvas's extensibility made that possible without having to build from scratch.
At Synapticure, the use case shifted again - working with Canvas to centralize and surface medication history at the point of care. Different architecture, different clinical needs, but the same underlying trust in the Canvas platform.
Efficiency at 5,000 orders a day
Wisp is a different animal. As a telehealth platform built around async care, the operational challenge isn't documentation - it's throughput. The team processes 5,000 orders daily, and the margin for inefficiency is thin.
When Simon joined Wisp as an advisor in 2024, his first instinct was actually to pump the brakes: don't change EMRs. But by early 2025, the calculus had shifted. "As a company, we decided we didn't want to be in the EMR business," he says. "When you have limited resources, building plumbing is not a differentiator.”
Canvas, as Simon describes it, sits right in the middle - usable out of the box, but built to be bespoke. His team started by building out all of Wisp's command structures in Canvas. Now, as new platform capabilities roll out, they move quickly to translate them into efficiency gains for providers working through a high volume of async visits.
A cold sweat, then a good night's sleep
Sometimes the best proof of a platform is a problem solved at 3 in the morning. Simon describes waking up anxious about a subscription-model complexity: patients with multi-fill prescriptions need to return and check in - and pay - before each fill. The workflow had friction…and real risk.
Amanda Martinez, Wisp's head of engineering, brought the problem to the newly launched Canvas Studio. The result surprised - and soothed - him. "I slept better last night than I did the night before," Simon says. A previously knotted workflow, completely untangled.
The copilot for clinical care
Looking ahead, Simon sees the most interesting opportunity in using Canvas to enforce clinical standards dynamically - not as a blunt checklist, but as a context-aware copilot. Think - a provider opens a visit, and Canvas surfaces the right questions and checks based on what the patient is there for and their history. It’s personalized guidance, at scale.
It's an extension of what drew him to the platform in the first place: the ability to encode best practices into the workflow, so good care doesn't depend on any individual clinician remembering every protocol.
As a self-described Chief Trade-off Officer, Simon's choice to implement Canvas three times isn't sentiment - it's a recurring judgment call that shows his conviction in the best product on the market. When you don't yet know what you'll need to build, flexibility isn't a nice-to-have; it’s the non-negotiable.
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