About
Led by Dr. Heather Ross, Temerty Medicine and Dr. Craig Simmons, Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, this Institutional Strategic Initiative between the University of Toronto and Ted Rogers Centre for Heart Research aims to create new healthcare technologies and care models that advance equitable access to high-quality and personalized heart failure care. TRANSFORM HF realizes its mission through connecting, supporting and amplifying a diverse and growing community of 260+ clinicians, engineers, researchers, people with lived experience, Indigenous communities, and industry partners in the co-development and implementation of equitable point-of-care diagnostics, wearable and embedded sensors, and AI technologies to monitor and proactively treat people with heart failure in their homes – transforming the lived experience of heart failure and improving outcomes.
A recent study led by Dr. Ross explored travel-related carbon cost reductions associated with remote titration of medication for heart failure treatment. While the team found significant positive climate impacts, the study failed to measure broader environmental impact, such as the energy consumption of virtual services, networks, and data storage upon which digital health solutions rely.
Key activities:
- Building upon this work, TRANSFORM HF partnered with the Collaborative Centre to host an International Workshop on the Principles and Priorities for Environmentally Sustainable Digital Health on April 23-24, 2024. The workshop brought together 30 local and international thought leaders in sustainable health systems, digital health innovations, and cardiology to discuss principles and priorities to inform policies and investments in a sustainable digital transformation of cardiology that are relevant to the digital transformation of health systems more broadly.
- Visiting scholar Dr. Gabrielle Samuel, co-lead of the SHADE Research Hub at Kings College London, keynoted the Symposium and provided City-wide Cardiology Rounds
- Drs. Ross, Simmons, Miller and colleagues submitted an NSERC Horizon Discovery grant application on the Climate cost of machine learning optimization in medicine: An interdisciplinary approach. This work seeks to develop a new metric for integrating carbon impact into the critical appraisal of AI models
Lead(s)
