NB clinic uses AI and Praxis to develop best practices

SAINT JOHN, NB – A Saint John emergency physician has set up an after-hours clinic in Rothesay as a laboratory for preventative healthcare – designed to work out the best ways to deliver it, and to feed what works back to family-practice and hospital colleagues across the province.

The clinic is one part of a three-legged project: the clinic itself; Praxis EHR, the New Brunswick-built sovereign Canadian electronic health record platform that makes those clinical lessons transferable, in active clinical production today; and to anchor Canada’s first sovereign medical AI infrastructure project, with a New Brunswick based consortium, which is purpose-built for the kind of high-consequence artificial intelligence that medical decisions require.

Dr. James French (pictured), an emergency physician at Saint John Regional Hospital for 12 years and assistant professor at Dalhousie University, has progressively reduced his fulltime Horizon hours since January 2026 to concentrate on the work.

White Pine Medical operates from inside ForFitness and Athletics at 2 Hampton Road, Rothesay. Every clinical workflow in the clinic -longevity assessment, performance medicine, preventative-care pathways – is observed, measured, and iterated.

The intent is not a boutique practice, but to determine what actually works in preventative care, then to transfer those lessons to the family-practice and hospital colleagues Dr. French has worked alongside for twelve years.

“Most attempts to reform primary care begin with a software platform or a policy paper. I wanted to begin with patients,” said Dr. French. “The clinic, the electronic health record platform, and the data-centre work are three legs of the same project.”

He explained: “The clinic is where we learn what works. Praxis EHR is the platform that makes the lessons transferable. And the sovereign artificial intelligence infrastructure is what gives the next generation of medical decision support a safe foundation. Medical AI is high-consequence AI — errors hurt patients, and many of those harms cannot be undone. It needs infrastructure that is sovereign, auditable, and built by clinicians as much as by engineers. None of that exists in Canada at clinically deployable scale today.”

Canadian health data cannot legally live on US-incorporated cloud infrastructure under Canadian privacy law and the anticipated federal artificial-intelligence framework.

Saint John positioning rests on existing NBTel-era dark fibre (former Premier McKenna’s “extraordinary resource”); existing regional power generation (Point Lepreau and hydro); and the federal precedent of the Cyber Attribution Data Centre ($10M / 5 yr, awarded December 2024 via Public Safety Canada through ACOA).

The clinical anchor is the active production deployment of the Praxis EHR at White Pine Medical. The technical co-lead is CanXP AI of Saint John — Vince McMullin (CEO, cofounder) and Eric Hubacheck (COO, co-founder) — builders of the MaplePT-Mini sovereign Canadian small-language-model architecture.

The transition aligns with the New Brunswick context: 21% of New Brunswickers without primary care, 41,000 patients left the Horizon emergency department without being seen in 2024-25, and more than half of NB emergency-department visits in the two least-urgent triage categories.

In 2026, New Brunswick announced a budget commitment of $50 million for digital health-record integration and $30 million to collaborative-care clinics.

About White Pine Medical.
White Pine Medical Inc. is a New Brunswick-incorporated medical and clinical-technology company founded by Dr. James French. He has been on stak at the Saint John Regional Hospital since 2013, and is also an assistant professor, Dalhousie University.

About CanXP AI.
CanXP AI is a Canadian artificial intelligence company building sovereign AI infrastructure, model training systems, secure inference services, and MapleOS — a human-in-the-loop AI operating system for developers, professionals, and organizations. CanXP AI helps businesses train, deploy, and operate private AI models across specialized domains including healthcare, legal, industrial, scientific, and enterprise knowledge workflows.