When it comes to digital innovation, Alex Mariakakis and his team are all ears! Meet our 2023 Seed Grant recipient, who’s aiming to make blood pressure monitoring more accessible using earbuds.
Earbuds have the potential to remove the cost of blood pressure cuffs, increase the ease of at-home monitoring, and could even out-perform smartwatches! Alex views earbuds as one of the next big platforms – not just for blood pressure monitoring, but for digital health in general.
In December 2022, Dr. Heather Ross and Dr. Joseph Cafazzo were named University Health Network’s Inventors of the Year in recognition of their development and commercialization of Medly– a remote heart failure care tool powered by software and AI. As part of #ECHODiscovery’s Fireside Chat speaker series, Heather and Joe joined us to talk all things Medly – from what’s required for a successful collaboration to what’s in store for the future of Medly Therapeutics as it spreads, scales, and integrates new features.
By supporting members of the TRANSFORM HF community in the development of new projects, our Collaboration Starter Grants aim to advance our mission of digital innovation for equitable heart failure care.
Another key objective of these grants is to foster new research partnerships and expand our network – something Dr. Jay Shaw has been able to do on a national scale through his pan-Canadian policy analysis of virtual care technologies.
The Ontario healthcare system is under strain, still recovering from the demands of the COVID-19 pandemic. The University Health Network (UHN) and Boehringer Ingelheim (Canada) Ltd. have partnered to address a critical need of heart failure patients.
The objective of the partnership is to expand patient reach of UHN’s successful Medly Program— an innovative, digital therapeutic solution that delivers the benefits of specialized clinical heart failure management at home while improving quality of life and reducing hospitalizations.
We are pleased to announce that both TRANSFORM HF’s applicants to the 2022 CIHR Health Systems Impact Fellows (HSI) competition, Sarah Lawrason and Samuel Petrie, were successful!
Learning about entrepreneurship is an ongoing process that should start with a program like ECHO Discovery.
Together, the Translational Biology & Engineering Program and TRANSFORM HF designed ECHO Discovery to introduce trainees to the world of ideation, research translation, and entrepreneurship.
ECHO Discovery provides an advantage to trainees who choose to pursue either a start-up or career in industry, health care, or government.
TRANSFORM HF members had the opportunity to participate in the On the Land Indigenous Education Program led by Dr. Angela Mashford-Pringle In May 2022.
Participants explored culturally-safe, strengths-based, and healing-informed clinical and research practices through hands-on, land-based learning.
TRANSFORM HF is very grateful to Dr. Angela Mashford-Pringle, her team, and the Elders and Cultural Knowledge Keepers and Helpers who made On the Land such an impactful experience.
Darshan Brahmbhatt’s interest in heart failure innovations and remote monitoring led him to become a 2021 TRANSFORM HF Trainee.
As his Trainee Award comes to a close, we sat down with Darshan to talk about his research over the past year and where he sees the field of digital health heading.
In a Canadian population of older ethnic adults living with heart failure, what is the impact of engaging family caregivers in a model of shared virtual care to support technology use and symptom management?
This is the question Dr. Quynh Pham and her team set out to answer as they build Medly Caretown, a family-centered shared virtual care model for patient-caregiver pairs.
TRANSFORM HF co-lead Dr. Heather Ross (Head, Division of Cardiology UHN-SHS) led a team to Moosonee and Moose Factory in May to continue to deepen our partnership with Weeneebayko Area Health Authority.
Following a COVID-imposed hiatus, the collaboration to address heart failure in the Weeneebayko region was renewed with a visit consisting of in-person clinics, community outreach, and a sharing circle.
