The Rogers Foundation announces a second landmark gift, building on its $130 million gift in 2014, to sustain the Ted Rogers Centre for Heart Research in perpetuity and bring the promise of precision cardiac health to patients across Canada and globally. In 2014, the...
Ted Rogers Chair in Heart Function Outcomes Dr. Douglas Lee leads new Heart-Brain Connection $3 million IMPACT Award project
Four unique educational events in October and December
Targeting heart failure in Indigenous communities
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Remembering Loretta Rogers
To enable equitable access to high-quality heart failure care, we co-create precise, predictive digital health solutions with patients and caregivers.
The Centre focuses on technology that enables people to receive individualized heart failure care anywhere – no matter their distance to hospital. Continuous monitoring and proactive, remote support helps clinicians and patients take action before symptoms worsen.
Underpinning this effort is Medly – a unique remote heart failure management program. Patients enter their symptoms, receive real-time feedback on self-care, and their medications are adjusted remotely in their Medly app. The clinical team uses the Medly dashboard to monitor patients and receives alerts when specialists must follow up on urgent issues.
At UHN, our Medly program reduced rehospitalizations by 50% and all-cause admissions by 24% for people with heart failure – while improving their self-care and quality of life. This is published in a 2020 study.
In 2020, Medly became the first telemonitoring system to be designated a Class II medical device by Health Canada. That year a pandemic struck: during COVID, our teams onboarded 500 new patients to Medly, helping keep vulnerable patients out of hospital.
Through Medly, we keep patients stable by flagging deteriorations and worsening symptoms early. Its sophisticated algorithm feeds an expert triage system by which one nurse can remotely monitor 350 patients at once.
For clinicians, Medly’s intuitive design enables them to seamlessly adopt the technology into their existing workflow while collecting meaningful patient data. For patients, it is easy to use and becomes a routine part of their daily life. Medly keeps patients safe at home, guarded by specialized care for which they’d otherwise need to visit clinics.
Medly is proven to safely titrate medications to achieve guideline-directed medical therapy faster than typical care. We are able to get patients to target doses of medications with fewer visits – further evidence of its potential as a cost-effective solution to keep heart failure patients safe at home. The team is devising an expert rules system to allow automatic titration of guideline directed care, which will be a world first.
The Medly program first transformed the model of care at UHN, and is now being deployed in specialty cardiac centres and primary care clinics across Ontario.
Meanwhile, our digital health innovations caught the attention of Apple, which partnered with our team to test how Apple Watches and iPhones can improve remote heart failure monitoring. Exciting studies include TRUE-HF, keying in on whether biometric data from an Apple Watch can estimate someone’s cardiorespiratory fitness – vital to determining prognosis in heart failure.
As COVID-19 devastated the population and tested hospital capacity, we leveraged deep data science efforts to create a new app. “RCOVID” automatically pulls together patient’s health-care data, including bloodwork and COVID tests, and prepopulated fields for physicians to quickly view.
As a virtual visit is complete, physicians can create a traditional clinic note that is stored in the EMR and accessible by all doctors in that patient’s circle of care. Through this app, clinicians efficiently delivered accessible virtual care and tracked and triaged at-risk patients. Over the first two years of the COVID pandemic, nearly 100,000 patients were managed with RCOVID, leading to a steep decline in ED admissions.
A wearable sensor for patients with heart failure is a health monitoring device that easily fits into someone’s everyday life, helping keep them safe at home. For example, sensors can be embedded in clothing to monitor key vital signs. These sensors communicate a patient’s status in real-time to their healthcare team.
Wearables and remote diagnostic sensors can come in a variety of forms, such as:
Our team, led by TRANSFORM HF, designs biosensors that reflect the needs of all people living in Canada and explores how to integrate them into models of care.