System Crash: How the Sask Party’s AIMS Wasted a Quarter-Billion and Broke Healthcare
How Scott Moe’s government turned a payroll “solution” into a catastrophic, quarter-billion-dollar health care nightmare, while healthcare workers and patients paid the real price.
I don’t watch the Saskatchewan Legislature or Question Period anymore.
Used to, religiously, until it just became too much. It’s unfortunate because it’s so important, yet unwatchable because the people participating in it behave so poorly.
The 2025 fall sitting of the Legislature, which kicked off with the Throne Speech on October 22, was supposed to start with the government’s “Strong, Safe, Secure” theme - heavy on self-congratulation, light on answers.
It never had a chance.
Mere hours after Premier Scott Moe’s government promised safety and security, an open letter from 450 exhausted, furious emergency room health workers at Royal University Hospital landed in Moe’s lap.
Conditions are “deplorable.”
Staff “moral injury” is rampant.
Patient safety is compromised.
450 hospital workers crying out for help from one hospital.
The NDP seized that moment and have spent most of their time in the 2025 fall session of the Legislature hammering on the health care crisis.
While the medical side of the crisis has rightly dominated the human front, at the end of October it collided headlong with the slow-motion plane crash that is Sask Health’s Administrative Information Management System (AIMS).
SHA CEO Andrew Will (salary: $445,000 tax dollars per year) announced at the end of October that the SHA was axing the latest rollout, or “phase” of AIMS, released mid-October. He claimed the aspects of the AIMS software which handles finance, payroll, human resources and supply chain systems are currently “stable”.
Awesome.
While it was supposed to be a cutting-edge digital solution to unify payroll and scheduling for health sector workers, AIMS quickly earned a reputation for being anything but.
For years, nurses and staff have complained about late or missing pay cheques and bizarre scheduling errors.
I wrote about it here three years ago (no paywall):
Saskatchewan Health Authority: AIMS High, Misses Spectacularly
We should probably talk about the Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA) and its multi-year, multi-million dollar failed rollout of its latest creation, the Administrative Information Management System (AIMS).
TLDR; AIMS was conceived as a solution meant to integrate 82 former health care regions’ administration and payroll systems into a single platform.
A catch-all fix for the SHA’s operational headaches.
It was wholly a Scott Moe undertaking, showing up for the first time in the Ministry of Health’s 2018-19 annual report - with an unbudgeted $45 million kickstart.
The project has lingered for years, soaking up massive amounts of time, money, and internal SHA resources. Former Health Ministers and their deputies touted AIMS as the cure for chronic problems flagged by the Provincial Auditor, including staff absenteeism, training gaps, and fragmented scheduling.
On retention and recruitment:
On absenteeism:
On lessons learned:
The accountable “private vendor”?
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