Solstice runs on Canadian-owned infrastructure and answers to Canadian law, and this page sets out what that means in practice.
Clinics ask us where their patient data is kept. Montreal is the short answer, and the longer one is about who owns the machines it sits on and which courts those owners answer to. Both answers are below, along with the parts of it we are willing to put in your agreement.
That second part is hard to establish about most health software sold in Canada. A vendor can be Canadian at the front desk and still run on infrastructure owned somewhere else, with backups, support staff, and AI processing spread across borders that the privacy policy describes only in general terms. We would rather write our own specifics down and let you check them.
The question worth asking any vendor is which courts can compel it.
Hosting and residency
Every line above is something we will put in writing in your agreement. If one of them changes, we update the agreement and this page.
How it works
Patient data in Solstice lives in Canadian data centres in Montreal. There is no configuration setting an administrator could use to route it somewhere else, and no failover region outside the country for it to land in during an incident. Keeping the data in the country is a property of how the system is built, so it does not depend on anyone remembering to check.
Our infrastructure is owned and operated by a Canadian company, so the machines holding the records answer to Canadian courts. Residency by itself does not settle that question, because data can sit in the Canadian region of a global cloud while the operator remains subject to foreign orders such as the United States CLOUD Act. We host with a Canadian operator so that only one country’s courts are ever involved in a request for access.
Our AI runs on open-weight models that we host ourselves, on hardware in the same Canadian facilities as everything else. A dictated note or a summary request is processed here, and nothing a clinician or a patient writes is used to train a model, by us or by a vendor further down the chain. Clinicians get ambient documentation, decision support and drafting help on the same terms as everything else in the platform, which is that the data behind the feature stays in the country.
Solstice is incorporated in Canada and staffed by people who live here. Our funding comes from Canadian customers and from Canadian non-dilutive programs, including FedNor, NOHFC, SR&ED, and IRAP. With no foreign venture capital on the cap table, the people deciding how patient data gets handled live under the same laws that govern it.
Written for Canadian rules
We build for Ontario first, where PHIPA sets the privacy terms and OHIP sets the billing, and we shaped the record model so that the rest of the country is a matter of configuration.
Consent directives, the lockbox, access logging, and the notification duties are implemented as product behaviour, so a clinic is not left enforcing them by hand or explaining a gap to a regulator later.
Québec’s Law 25, Alberta’s HIA, and the British Columbia statutes differ in ways that matter, and the record model treats province as a real property of the data, so the rules that apply follow the patient.
OHIP billing, provincial lab feeds, and the Canadian drug databases were part of the first version, because a practice here cannot get through a day without them.
Every access to a record is logged, and a clinic can produce that log itself when a patient or a regulator asks who has looked at a chart.
Both official languages
In Solstice the interface language belongs to each person’s account, so a francophone patient reads a result and messages a care team in French while the practice works in whichever language it uses day to day. A clinic in a bilingual town can serve everyone who walks in without running two systems or asking half of them to read English.
French ships in the same release as English, and a feature waits until both are ready.
Where we are
More detail
Book a 15-minute call with a founder and ask whatever you need to about where your data would go.
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