Why I’m building Button Health
I’m Erik, the owner of Button Health, a family doctor’s office opening at Bay and College. I’m not a doctor, so you won’t see me in the exam room. I have two jobs here.
The first is you. I want everything around your visit to be easy: booking, reaching us, hearing back, and knowing what comes next. I also want you to leave knowing more than when you came in, about your health and about how to make Ontario’s healthcare system work for you.
The second is the doctors. I want their time going to patients, not paperwork. That means a well-trained front desk, clear information before every visit, and workflows that take as much manual work off their plate as possible. Doctors who aren’t buried in admin have more attention for you, and they stay. A doctor who stays is how you get the long-term relationship most patients are looking for.
A few years ago, back home in Calgary, I had a hypothesis: the patient experience improves when it’s easier to book, easier to reach the clinic, and easier to keep track of your information between visits. More than 750 people validated the idea, and paid me for it before it existed. Then came a pandemic and a stretch of work with dentists who wanted real insight into their practices and their patients’ journeys, and that path led me here.
My career, going back to before the turn of the century, has been organizational change. I take operations that have stopped serving the people who depend on them and make them work again. The first step is always the same: find the actual problem, not the assumed one. So before designing anything, I listened to Toronto patients in two ways.
What 110,722 Google reviews say
I wrote code to pull every public Google review of clinics across Toronto, Steeles to the lake, Etobicoke to Scarborough. That came to just over 260,000 reviews across roughly 2,300 clinics. I removed the walk-ins to look at family medicine on its own, which left 110,722 reviews across 1,316 practices.
33,036 of them were one star, just under 30%. The average clinic rating was 3.85.
I tagged every negative review by what it complained about.
| What patients complained about | Share of negative reviews | From a Toronto review |
|---|---|---|
| Can’t get an appointment | ~35% | “Not accepting new patients because the doctor has more than enough patients.” |
| Can’t reach the office | ~33% | “Called 8 times. On hold 5 to 15 minutes each time. When someone finally picks up, they hang up.” |
| The wait | ~29% | “Two hours in the waiting room, then 15 minutes in the office, for a 2-minute checkup.” |
| The front desk | ~29% | “I had to switch family doctors because the front staff are the problem, not the practitioners.” |
| Felt unheard by the doctor | ~8% | “Interrupted my symptom explanation three times.” |
| Concerns about the medical care | ~7% | “Misdiagnosed and prescribed the wrong meds for the wrong issue.” |
Percentages overlap, since one review can name more than one thing.
Look at the gap between the fourth row and the fifth. The top four complaints have nothing to do with medicine. They’re about getting in, getting through, and getting looked after once you’re there.
What my waitlist says
Google shows you what makes someone angry enough to post in public. It doesn’t show you why people go looking for a new doctor. For that I have something better: the people on Button Health’s waitlist, who told us in their own words what has bothered them about family medicine. Over 1200 people have answered so far.
The first surprise: about 40% of them already have a family doctor. They’re looking anyway.
Some of that is geography. Plenty of people moved downtown and kept a doctor in Markham, Mississauga, Scarborough or Hamilton because they couldn’t find one closer. One person had kept a doctor in Thornhill and hadn’t seen her in more than five years. Another, without a car, hadn’t made it to their Scarborough doctor in over four.
The second surprise: almost nobody complained about front desk staff. They complained about not being able to reach them. Voicemail. Never hearing back. One person put it simply: “i want to hear back even if the results are fine.”
The biggest theme was the visit itself. Feeling rushed, feeling unheard, and again and again, a doctor starting from zero:
“Having to explain over and over again because the Doctor forgets.”
“She is so busy… she hasn’t prepped so remembers nothing and doesn’t look at the file.”
Nobody was questioning anyone’s character. Many people said it themselves: “I know everyone is busy.” One person asked for doctors who “would listen more to their patients but not to the point that other patients have to wait longer for their turn.”
That’s a patient describing the exact problem I set out to solve.
The visit is short. None of it should be wasted.
Family medicine is hard work. The Ontario College of Family Physicians reported in April 2024 that family physicians spend an average of 19 hours a week on administrative tasks.1 Schedules are tight, and most of the doctors I’ve met wish they had more time with each patient and less on admin work.
I can’t add hours to the day. What I can do, as the owner or director of Button Health, is make sure the time your doctor has is spent on you and not on catching up.
That’s the core design decision behind Button Health. Your forms and history are collected ahead of time. Members add the reason for their visit when they book online. Your doctor reviews it before walking into the exam room, so the appointment starts with the problem you came in for instead of a search through the file.
The same thinking runs through the rest of the clinic. Every hour a patient spends on hold, chasing a result or re-explaining their history is wasted. So is every minute a doctor spends finding out why someone is there. Respecting time, yours and your doctor’s, is the whole point.
There are good physicians and clinic teams across this city already working hard on these problems. My advantage is that I get a clean sheet. I get to build a practice around doctors and patient flow from day one, instead of retrofitting one that’s already running at full speed. That was one of the major difficulties when I was a practice consultant at my other company Disruptive Advice, trying to change/retrain around a working business with ingrained processes. This time it’s clean, and that’s faster and easier to decision tree and template from an operations perspective. Further, people who sign up to Button believe in what we stand for, and I am excited and happy with the progress so far.
What we’re building
At Button Health, the doctors and OHIP-covered care are the same for everyone. You can book and follow up by phone. Our optional paid membership adds digital tools on top: online booking, messaging the clinic, and access to records, a health dashboard, a way to connect all your fitness devices, regular independent testing of food, and more all shared through the patient portal. I am committed to extending the features and uses, and I will be reaching out to ask what is valuable to you.
| What patients told us | What we’re building |
|---|---|
| “Nobody answers the phone.” | You can call to book, and front desk staff have clear responsibilities for handling calls and bookings. Members can also book online at any time. |
| “I never heard back.” | Every patient gets appointment and follow-up-due reminders, and can call about results or receive a call from us. Members get results and automated follow-up through the portal, with a notification to log in. |
| “I have to explain my history every time.” | Your forms and history are collected before your first visit. Members add their main concern when booking, and the doctor reads it before entering the room. Every patient can explain their concern during the appointment. |
| “A different stranger every time.” | An ongoing relationship with your family medicine care team, member or not. This is not a walk-in. |
Read about the membership and what it includes. If you want the longer version of how care in Ontario is organized, I wrote a guide to using the Canadian healthcare system.
Your part in it
Whichever way you use the clinic, you can take an active part in your health. Keep track of changes you notice, read up on your conditions, and put your questions into the booking form so we have time to look at them prior. That’s what I mean by being high-agency about your health.1 You bring knowledge of your own experience, and your doctor brings the clinical expertise.
A different kind of clinic
Bay and College is where we start. The goal is more Button Health locations across the GTA, each one built the same way.
We’re building the waitlist now for Bay and College. If you see my team in the neighbourhood, say hello. If you see one of our ads, sign up.
I’m not the one in the exam room. I’m the one making sure everything around it works. That’s the part I take personally.
To everyone who has called asking: yes, we’re opening. Finding the right physicians takes time, and I’d rather open with the right team than open fast. Thank you for your patience, for your calls, and for believing in what we’re building. I feel like sometimes I am this bear.
Join the priority list for first access when we open.
About the data: I analyzed public Google reviews of family-medicine clinics across the City of Toronto in 2026: 110,722 reviews across 1,316 practices after excluding walk-in clinics, of which 33,036 were one star. Theme percentages are the share of negative reviews mentioning each issue and overlap. Waitlist comments come from Button Health’s priority-list signup form. No clinic is named, and every quote is reproduced without identifying the person who wrote it.
References
- OCFP Statement: Administrative Burden. Ontario College of Family Physicians, April 2024. ontariofamilyphysicians.ca/news/ocfp-statement-administrative-burden/
- Addressing physicians’ administrative burden: the invisible crisis in family medicine. Canadian Medical Association, August 2023. cma.ca/latest-stories/addressing-physicians-administrative-burden-invisible-crisis-family-medicine
Footnotes
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High agency is the capacity to take initiative, take ownership of your outcomes, and act on what you can control rather than waiting on the system or blaming it. For your health it means learning how your own body works, reading up on your conditions and results, and coming in informed, so you are an active participant in your care instead of a passive one. ↩