From Three Frustrated Doctors to Canada's Fastest-Growing EMR: The Arya Health Story

Every founding story starts with a problem someone refused to accept. For Arya Health, that problem was staring three physicians in the face every single day: a fax machine that never stopped jamming, a charting system that ate more hours than it saved, and a healthcare system running on software that felt frozen in the year 2000.

This is the story of how Dr. Sam Gharbi, Dr. Richard Sztramko, and Dr. Richard Vandegriend turned that frustration into Arya — and how a bootstrapped idea between three friends became one of the fastest-growing EMR platforms in Canada.

2016: The Spark

Long before Arya had a name, it had a headache. Sam Gharbi was deep into his medical training in internal medicine when he kept running into the same wall: the technology meant to support physicians was actually slowing them down. The systems were clunky, unintuitive, and clearly built by people who had never actually sat across from a patient trying to pull up a chart in real time.

That frustration pushed Gharbi to pursue a master's degree in clinical informatics — he wanted to understand why healthcare technology was so far behind everything else, and whether it could actually be fixed. Around the same time, two of his close friends and fellow physicians, geriatrician and internal medicine specialist Richard Sztramko and cardiologist Richard Vandegriend, were living the exact same reality in their own practices.

None of the three had a background in software engineering. What they had was something arguably more valuable: thousands of hours spent inside the workflow they wanted to fix. In 2016, the three doctors made a decision that would define the next decade of their careers — if nobody was going to build the EMR physicians actually needed, they would build it themselves.

2017–2019: Building in the Trenches

The early years of Arya were exactly what you'd expect from a company started by three practicing physicians with no coding background — scrappy, self-taught, and relentless. Working out of Vancouver, the co-founders began shaping what would become Arya EHR, guided by one core principle: if you're designing a race car, you want a driver in the room, not just an engineer.

That philosophy became Arya's north star. Every workflow, every screen, every click was measured against a simple question: does this actually make sense for someone standing in an exam room with a patient in front of them? It's a standard most legacy EMRs, built by developers with no clinical experience, had never been held to.

By the end of the decade, Arya had grown from an idea into real software, live in real clinics across British Columbia — small in scale, but already proving that physician-led design could produce something fundamentally different from the legacy platforms doctors had grudgingly tolerated for years.

2020–2021: The Pandemic Changes Everything

Then the world changed. When COVID-19 hit, it exposed every crack in Canada's healthcare technology all at once. Clinics shut their doors. Physicians who relied on on-site servers and paper charts suddenly had no way to access patient records. Fax machines — the supposed backbone of medical communication — sat useless in empty offices.

For a cloud-based platform like Arya, this moment was a brutal but clarifying test. As Gharbi has described it, the pandemic exposed the shortcomings of the country's healthcare technology virtually overnight, but it also forced overdue change — governments rapidly loosened restrictions on telehealth and phone-based care that had been blocked for years. Practices that could adapt digitally kept running. Practices that couldn't, struggled.

Arya leaned directly into that shift, doubling down on telehealth capability and cloud accessibility at exactly the moment Canadian physicians needed it most. It was, in a strange way, the proof of concept the founders had been building toward since 2016.

2021–2023: From Vancouver to a National Platform

Word spread the way it usually does in medicine — through trusted colleagues. Physicians who switched to Arya told other physicians. Clinics like Bloor Pain Specialists came on board in early 2021 and never looked back. St. Paul's Neurology Associates followed. What started as a BC-based platform began expanding into Alberta and Ontario, as more clinics grew tired of paying more for less with legacy vendors.

Behind the scenes, the three co-founders settled into distinct but tightly coordinated roles — Gharbi overseeing product design and development, Sztramko focused on operations and business development, and Vandegriend leading sales. Despite functioning almost like three co-CEOs, the founders have described their dynamic as unusually fluid: close enough as friends to argue over decisions and get over it just as fast.

2023–2025: The AI Era Begins

As large language models and AI tools matured, Arya moved quickly to fold them into the product rather than treat them as a side feature. AI-powered scribing began transcribing patient encounters automatically. Smart charting tools and dictation reduced the administrative weight physicians had been carrying for years. Integrated eFax eliminated yet another third-party headache. The platform that started as a better alternative to outdated software was evolving into something legacy vendors couldn't easily copy — an EMR built around AI from the inside out, not bolted on as an afterthought.

This is also the period where enterprise clinics started taking notice. Multidisciplinary groups with dozens of practitioners needed more than a nice interface — they needed a platform that could scale, stay PHIPA compliant, and hold up under real operational pressure.

2026: Six Provinces, and Counting

Today, Arya is used by thousands of clinical users across six provinces — a footprint that would have been hard to imagine back in 2016, when the entire company was three doctors and a shared frustration. Specialist clinics like Cephala MD rely on Arya to manage complex, high-volume neuroscience care. Large physician-led networks like Terra Nova Medical, operating more than 20 clinic locations across British Columbia, have chosen Arya as their enterprise EMR platform to support the next phase of their growth.

What hasn't changed is the thing that started it all: Arya is still built and led by the physicians who founded it, still measuring every feature against the same question they asked in 2016 — does this actually help the person using it?

The Bigger Picture

The Arya story isn't really about software. It's about what happens when the people closest to a broken system stop waiting for someone else to fix it. Three physicians, no coding background, one shared conviction that healthcare technology could be better — and a decade later, a platform trusted by clinics from coast to coast.

The legacy EMRs took twenty years to get comfortable. Arya took ten to make them nervous.