How technology is enabling exceptional care at Canada’s No. 1 hospital

With tools like virtual reality and ChatGPT, society has made powerful leaps toward a future that’s powered by technology and innovation. But far from invasion of the robots, at Canada’s leading health-care centre, cutting-edge medical advances require a human touch—and a strong partnership between people and technology.

“You really need both to innovate,” says Dr. Thomas Forbes, surgeon-in-chief at the Sprott Department of Surgery at Toronto’s University Health Network (UHN). “Technology is playing a crucial role in propelling advancements in surgery and health care at UHN and beyond, to make care more personalized, better, safer and more accurate. These new tools augment human surgeons and push the boundaries of surgical techniques.”

Breaking ground across the health-care spectrum

It’s a powerful partnership that’s enabling UHN’s 17,000-plus staff to deliver life-changing breakthroughs that are improving outcomes and dissolving barriers to better patient care across specialties and the entire care continuum.

Dr. Forbes is proud of UHN’s long list of recent advances in health care, including the exciting technologies that are making headlines and piquing interest and curiosity around the world.

“We’re seeing improved precision, faster recovery times and better outcomes conducting Canada- and world-first robot-assisted surgeries,” he says.

“We’re using AI to analyze medical images and clinical information to help with early disease detection as well as to identify patients at risk for deterioration and to assist surgeons during procedures. In training, we’re employing virtual reality to allow surgeons to practise complex procedures in a simulation before taking them to the operating room.” New, minimally invasive surgical techniques that rely on computer vision; 3-D printing for planning and education; technology that maintains and repairs organs for transplants, including lungs, outside the body—UHN’s list of advances runs long.

Helping staff deliver better care

UHN’s spirit of innovation and pioneering approach have indirect benefits too, helping health-care workers to overcome common challenges and barriers they face on the job.

According to Pam Hubley, vice-president and chief nurse executive at UHN, “Technology can remove administrative burdens, reduce cognitive overload, streamline information sharing, support access to care for diverse groups of people and enable connection and therapeutic relationships that are easy for patients to navigate to get the right information and the guidance they need. It can extend the efforts of nurses to ensure patients get the best care in a timely manner.”

Most importantly, Hubley believes leaning into technology can help make health care more human. “We will always need nurses who are smart, compassionate and capable of caring to meet the mental health and physical needs of patients and their families,” she says.

New UHN-developed programs, such as HaloCare—a telemonitoring system that can remotely identify changes in a patient’s condition, now used in all of UHN’s hospitals and other health centres across the country—help free up capacity to deliver even more human-centred care.

Hubley and Dr. Forbes agree that innovation couldn’t be achieved without the support of not only UHN’s own teams, but the community at large, whose donations help UHN continue to invest in technology and research that help keep Canada at the forefront of medicine.

“Our future is exciting,” says Hubley. “Those in Canada should be very proud and excited to have UHN in their backyard. We are leaders in our field, and we are collaborators and innovators across all disciplines, so that new and exciting ideas and approaches can be generated and realized right here in Toronto.”

To learn more about how you can help UHN leverage people and technology to drive the future of health care, visit UHNITED.ca.