History
UOHI was founded in 1969 by Dr. Wilbert J. Keon, with financial support from the Ontario Ministry of Education. Dr. Keon worked with numerous partners, including all of the hospitals in the region, the University of Ottawa, and the Ottawa Hospital Regional District Planning council, to ensure the vision of a world-renowned Institute would unfold as planned. The first phase of the Heart Institute—the Cardiac Unit, as it was then known—officially opened on May 11, 1976.
UOHI is now the sole, independent provider of specialized cardiovascular care for the Champlain Local Health Integration Network, home to over 1 million people (9 percent of the population of Ontario), and serves more than 40 referral hospitals throughout the province.
In 2005, UOHI recruited Dr. Robert Roberts from Baylor College of Medicine to serve as President and Chief Executive Officer. Dr. Roberts, an internationally recognized investigator in the field of molecular genetics, was brought in to place a greater emphasis on research within the Institute. Shortly afterwards, UOHI established the Ruddy Canadian Cardiovascular Genetics Centre, the first such centre in Canada and one of only a handful worldwide dedicated to cardiovascular genetics.
The Institute has been responsible for numerous ‘firsts,’ including:
- Ontario's first angioplasty
- The first use in Canada, and 11th in the world, of the Jarvik 7 artificial heart as a bridge to transplant
- A heart transplant on the youngest recipient in Canada (an 11-day-old infant)
- Canada's first cardiac positron emission tomography (PET) centre
- Discovery of a genetic mutation that causes one of the most common forms of heart disease—atrial fibrillation
- Identification of the first single nucleotide polymorphism that increases susceptibility to heart disease regardless of other established risk factors
- A one-of-a-kind Canadian home telehealth monitoring program that cuts hospital readmission by 54 percent for heart failure patients
Read more about this topic: University Of Ottawa Heart Institute
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