The Government of the Northwest Territories has launched a one-year pilot program using Mika AI Scribe to help health-care providers with note taking and record keeping.
The pilot will run from January to December 2026 in select primary care and community health settings across the territory, the government said in a news release. The goal is to give providers more time with patients and reduce time spent on documentation.
Under the program, Mika AI Scribe transcribes live speech during patient visits into draft clinical notes. Providers review and edit the draft before manually transferring relevant information to a patient’s file, and the draft is deleted automatically after seven days. The software does not record or retain audio files.
Participation in the pilot is voluntary, and patients must give written consent before the tool is used. They can revoke consent at any time, according to the Department of Health and Social Services. Privacy protections are in place under the territory’s Health Information Act, and only a patient’s care team can access information generated by the tool.
“There’s a whole range of safeguards that we have in place,” said Meaghan Nolan, co-founder and COO of Mikata Health, the company behind the Mika AI Scribe. “In terms of minimizing and mitigating the risks that something will happen, we definitely have best in class privacy and security.”
One major risk with AI tools is the use of personal information in training data, where the information fed into the tool as part of its normal use is used to train future versions, allowing them to reproduce that private data.
Nolan says Mikata has taken steps to prevent this.
“Something that sets Mikata apart from other vendors that are out there, we do not use personal data- deidentified, anonymized, otherwise- we don’t use any of that in our training and fine tuning.”
Health Minister Lesa Semmler said the pilot is part of efforts to modernize the health system while maintaining strong privacy and consent safeguards.
The pilot received 80 licences through Canada Health Infoway, a federally funded not-for-profit organization that supports digital health initiatives. The GNWT plans a six-month review to assess how the tool fits into health-care workflows before deciding on its future use
