Alberta, Canada is going through a period of unprecedented demand for health services, driven by the Province’s growth. Problems arising from population growth have led to a gradual realization among health region planners that better tools are needed to help make policy decisions. We discuss our progress to date in introducing systems thinking and system dynamics modeling as tools for evaluating alternative health policy decisions. To date, we have held a workshop to introduce Calgary Health Region opinion leaders to what system dynamics can and cannot do, and have begun model development work in two areas. The first is in emergency care services and the second is in colorectal cancer screening. In this paper we describe the problems being tackled and the preliminary (qualitative) models that have been developed.