Editor's note: This story is a collaboration between the Investigative Journalism Foundation and TVO.
The Ontario government approved a medical transcription tool even though its website advertised what seem to be fake testimonials from nonexistent doctors.
Online, ADGScribe describes itself as a tool that “simplifies medical transcription using real-time AI to convert clinical speech into accurate, actionable notes.”
It is one of roughly two dozen medical transcription tools the Ontario government has pre-approved for use by the province’s doctors.
But ADGScribe’s website lists glowing reviews from two physicians who do not appear to exist — or at least aren’t registered to practice medicine anywhere in Canada.
That service also seems to have a connection to a B.C. website posting what appear to be AI-generated news stories, including some containing complete fabrications.
Observers say this link raises further questions about the government’s procurement process. An Ontario auditor-general report published last month found the province approved 20 of those transcription tools despite evidence that the medical notes they produced in tests included inaccuracies, such as completely fabricated information.
“It’s the kind of thing that takes peoples’ confidence completely away,” said Ontario NDP MPP and shadow minister for health France Gélinas.
“If this company is willing to put out information that is not accurate, that has not been verified, and put it out as truth and news, then they show who they are. They cannot be trusted. But yet, they are the ones in charge of putting notes in medical charts.”
ADGScribe did not respond to questions for this story.
Mehta and Wellington
In 2024, Ontario’s government promoted an “AI Scribe” program to encourage the province's doctors to reduce paperwork.
The next year, Supply Ontario, a Crown agency, began a “vendor-of-record” program, essentially pre-qualifying certain tools for use by physicians.
One of those tools was ADGScribe, whose parent company ADGTech has a registered office in the Vancouver area and a parallel registration in India.
On its website, ADGScribe claims its products are used to support more than 1,000 patients every day.
It also lists glowing testimonials from two physicians named Dr. David Mehta and Dr. James Wellington, who claimed the tool had improved their operations and saved them hours otherwise spent on paperwork.
The IJF and TVO searched physician registries in every Canadian province and the Yukon, but found no record of physicians by those names who are currently registered to practice medicine in Canada.
Regulators in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut — which do not have publicly searchable registries — confirmed no doctors by those names are registered to practice medicine in either territory.
The testimonials on ADGScribe’s website also included headshots of Mehta and Wellington. But reporters found the same headshots posted on different websites on the internet, listing completely different names and occupations.
The IJF and TVO sent a list of questions about the irregularities to Anuj Sayal, the managing director and CEO of ADGTech, the company behind ADGScribe. He did not respond by publication time.
The company’s Canadian address is the downtown Vancouver office in Simon Fraser University's Venturelabs tech accelerator, which has a partnership with ADGTech but does not host its operations.
Reporters also visited a residential address that Sayal has listed in public tender documents, but did not see anyone there. A note was left with a phone number, but no response was received.
The phone number listed by ADGScribe on its website was also invalid.
Surrey Speak
A previous IJF investigation found ADGTech was likely the force behind Surrey Speak, an online news site publishing what appear to be AI-generated stories based on real-life recent news events.
Surrey Speak advertises itself as a community news publication centred on “real people, real issues and real change.”
But the website, whose articles are written by authors with names like “Lucas” and “John N.,” has published what appear to be AI-generated stories — and in some cases, complete fabrications.
In February, Surrey Speak published a since-deleted story claiming that local politician William Azaroff had stepped down in disgrace from an executive role in his party over an unspecified social media scandal.
But Azaroff never stepped down from that position, which he never held. In fact, he had recently won his party’s nomination to run for the Vancouver mayorship.
“It seemed like it was more trying to get out an AI-generated news story about someone in the public spotlight, potentially to feed more AI stories we assume,” Azaroff told TVO’s Molly Thomas in an interview broadcast last month.
Surrey Speak has also published what appear to be AI-generated images of real-life victims of crime.
An ADGTech spokesperson has denied the company has any relationship to Surrey Speak.
But another website affiliated with ADGTech lists Surrey Speak as one of its projects. Previous versions of Surrey Speak’s website also affiliate it with ADGTech.
The IJF spoke to ADGTech director Pankaj Sayal who confirmed that Sayal, ADGTech’s CEO, was the one who “looks after” Surrey Speak.
The IJF and TVO attempted to speak to Anuj Sayal directly by visiting a personal address in Surrey, B.C., that Sayal has listed in public tender bids. No one answered the door or phoned to return a note left by a reporter.
Poor diagnosis for medical transcription tools
The revelations around ADGScribe’s parent company come as questions emerge about the reliability of the medical transcription tools greenlit by Ontario’s government.
In a report last month, Ontario auditor general Shelley Spence found Supply Ontario, the Crown corporation in charge of government procurement, reviewed 20 of those tools greenlit by the government in the initial round of approval.
Her report found evidence of all reviewed tools producing inaccurate medical notes during the procurement’s tests.
Those notes, the report said, included one or more of three types of errors: missing or incomplete information, incorrect information or “hallucinations” about a patient’s medical conditions and recommended courses of treatment.
The report did not mention ADGScribe by name, but it did say that all 20 tools tested by the government generated inaccuracies, but were approved anyway.
The auditor-general’s office would not explicitly confirm that ADGScribe was one of those tools at that time, but her review covered the period of January to November 2025. Archived versions of the Supply Ontario webpage from June of 2025 show that ADGScribe was one of the 20 approved tools listed online by the Ontario government during that time frame. These same 20 vendors, including ADGTech's ADGScribe, are also still listed publicly on the Ontario government’s “Ministry of Public and Business Service Delivery” webpage, which reflect the qualified vendor list approved in April of 2025.
The auditor-general’s report also said that 11 of the 20 approved tools did not submit required third-party audit reports of their services.
In Supply Ontario’s approach to evaluating potential vendors, the accuracy of a program’s output counted for only 4 per cent of a company’s final score.
Supply Ontario did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
A spokesperson for Ontario's Minister of Health said roughly 5,000 physicians in the province were using an AI scribe program, and that there were no known reports of patient harm.
“Use of this technology is entirely voluntary and requires patient consent, including informing patients how AI will be used, before it is used during an appointment,” spokesperson Ema Popovic said in a statement.
Spence said she nevertheless wants doctors to look carefully at the notes those tools generate.
“With technologies like this, we want to use them. We want to come forward, but we also need to be careful and have those controls in place,” Spence told TVO’s Thomas in an interview.
Gélinas, the Ontario NDP MPP, argued the entire process should be restarted.She said the procurement approach was flawed and risks undercutting the confidence patients have in transcription tools and, by extension, their doctors.
“People won’t trust it. And once you don’t trust your health care providers, you don’t follow through with the treatment plan,” Gélinas said.
She said the entire procurement process should be restarted and all approved vendors should be required to re-apply.
Online, ADGScribe claims it has more than 500 clients, though it does not say where or who they are.
Ontario doctors aren’t the only public service ADGTech has courted.
Public tender documents indicate Sayal has pitched the firm’s services to a variety of government agencies, including the government of the Yukon, municipalities, universities and at least two police services across the country.
It’s not clear if any have done business with the company.