Ottawa Heart Institute (UOHI) is Canada’s largest and foremost heart health center dedicated to understanding, treating, and preventing heart disease. The new expansion contains all life support services, including operating rooms, interventional suites, and a Cardiac Surgery intensive care unit.
Besides the use of wide swaths of natural light in the building’s design, UOHI is also featuring some of the latest in advanced technologies, including a “cardiac robot,” and Philips newest technology in Canada – Azurion.
“This really allows [us to use] the most advanced cardiovascular technology, with better infrastructure,” said Dr. Thierry Mesana, president, and CEO of the heart institute, reports CBC Canada. “[That’s] really deserved by this team — which is, in my view, the best team that we have in the world.”
The expansion comes along just as the Ottawa Hospital’s Civic Campus, where the institute is situated, gets ready to relocate to a new parcel of land on the nearby Central Experimental Farm. Mesana said that while the Heart Institute will eventually become part of the new location, it made sense to go ahead with the expansion.
Mesana refused to speculate on how long patients would have access to the new expansion before it is relocated. “I don’t want to give a number of years,” Mesana told CBC Radio’s Ottawa Morning. “What is important is always to have a heart institute, because this model of cardiac care is a jewel for our community.”
Fascinating robot technology
Part of the expansion features a cardiac robot, the da Vinci Surgical System, that allows surgeons to operate through just a few small incisions. The da Vinci System represents the latest in surgical and robotics technologies and is adaptable to a number of surgeries, from head and neck to cardiac and colon procedures.
The da Vinci System features a magnified 3D high-definition vision system and tiny wristed instruments that bend and rotate far greater than the human hand. As a result, da Vinci enables a surgeon to operate with enhanced vision, precision, and control.
The surgeon is 100 percent in control of the da Vinci System at all times. da Vinci technology translates your surgeon’s hand movements into smaller, precise movements of tiny instruments inside your body. In cardiac surgery, this means small incisions between a patient’s ribs instead of cracking open the rib cage.
“It’s definitely a fascinating tool,” Mesana said. “It’s a very delicate surgery. It’s not [applicable] for every type of cardiac surgery. There is very restricted use of this technology.”
The next generation image-guided therapy platform
Seven of the ten labs in the new expansion will also feature Philips newest technology, called Azurion. The platform, combined with intravascular ultrasound and clinical informatics will be used for performing a range of cardiac interventions. Azurion is a next-generation image-guided therapy platform.
In addition to the image-guided therapy platform, Philips has provided the UOHI’s new Cardiac Surgery intensive care unit with a new patient monitoring network consisting of 22 Philips IntelliVue MX800 and central surveillance stations.
“It will be very beneficial to patient outcomes because cardiac surgeries are very complex procedures and sometimes people need longer time to recover,” he said. Surgeries are expected to begin on Tuesday.
