On May 21, 2026 we hosted the first Canvas Medical BUILD Summit at the Presidio Log Cabin in San Francisco. Fifty builders, clinicians, and engineers from Canvas customer teams spent the day extending and customizing their EMR together.
By 5pm we had over 40 plugins shipped, 25 of them from people who had never written code.
The numbers:
💻 25 plugins built by non-developers
👥 15 customer teams shipped working code
🎤 8 live customer demos
⏱️ 5 hours from blank screen to live in Canvas
💰 ~$3,000 in Claude tokens across the entire day
What got built
A snapshot of the day's output:
Each plugin solves a specific clinical, operational or financial workflow problem that the customer teams have had to workaround every day.
Studio: an in-product coding agent
Canvas Studio lets anyone in Canvas build a plugin by chatting with an agent. Describe the workflow wanted and Studio writes it, tests it, and ships it to your Canvas instance.
No coding experience required. Just the people who know the work best.
Navigator: a Slack support agent
Canvas Navigator is a Slack agent that answers customer questions about Canvas. Reports, platform questions, plugin lookups, all from inside Slack.
Navigator is in beta for all customers who attended BUILD.
What this means for healthcare builders
The barrier to customizing a clinical workflow used to be a six-month vendor roadmap conversation. At BUILD, the barrier was lunch.
"The value of a perfect plan has never been lower. Let's just start. Let's just build." - Adam Farren, Canvas Medical CEO
Fireside guests Arif Sorathia, Simon Williams, and Miranda Zhao shared their perspectives on how Canvas customers are changing the landscape of building in healthcare.
Read the live blog from BUILD 2026 for a session-by-session recap.
