St. Michael's Hospital Foundation

Fifty years after Dr. Paul Dorian walked into St. Mike’s as a 23-year-old intern, Canada's pioneer of electrophysiology reflects on the hospital culture that earned his loyalty, the patients who taught him everything, and the next frontier for heart care. Read Dr. Dorian’s story: https://bit.ly/4yHmpa1

What does it take to turn mission and values into exceptional care for everyone? For Altaf Stationwala, President and CEO of Unity Health Toronto, the answer is concrete, one commitment at a time.    Underneath that commitment is a deep conviction: that real humanity means focusing on someone else.     “Around the world, what we are losing, unfortunately, is our humanity,” Altaf says. “Our ability to relate to one another despite our differences, to find a common good, to put someone else before ourselves, to set self-interest aside long enough to care about someone else’s life.”     Hospitals, at their best, are one of the few places that still require everyone to care about someone else.     One year later, that conviction guides everything he sees—from St. Mike’s commitment to health equity, to the network’s electronic patient record system, and to the donors he calls “fierce believers” in St. Mike’s mission.    “Every person in our hospitals is there because of someone else’s need,” he says.    Read more about how Altaf is turning mission and values into something concrete: https://lnkd.in/g_Nh7crH

Innovation isn't just about discovering new treatments. It's about making care easier to access. Dr. Sean B. Rourke and the team at St. Mike's are expanding free HIV self-testing across Canada, helping reach more people, wherever they are. Read the full story: https://lnkd.in/gRQAJ63D

When Scotiabank invested in GEMINI through ScotiaRISE last year, it backed a bold idea: that responsibly governed health data and AI could be harnessed to improve care and outcomes for patients nationwide. Today, that idea has evolved into Vital—a pan-Canadian health data platform led by St. Michael’s physician-scientists and recognized as a cornerstone of Canada’s National Artificial Intelligence Strategy. This milestone means earlier diagnoses, faster discoveries, and better care for patients and families. Moments like this are only possible because partners choose to act early, to believe in ideas before they are proven at scale, and to stand with us as they grow. We are deeply grateful to Scotiabank for its enduring commitment to St. Michael’s and the future of healthcare. Read the full story here: https://lnkd.in/gq7HCX2W Unity Health Toronto, Fahad Razak, Amol Verma

Our team's new paper shows that patients experiencing homelessness are much more likely to have delayed discharges from hospital. When people don't have a safe place to recuperate after hospitalization, it's bad for patients and bad for our health care system. It's yet another consequence of homelessness that most people don't see.

For decades, multiple sclerosis (MS) diagnoses rested on patient symptoms and neurological exams. As scientific tools have advanced, diagnosis increasingly relies on biological markers. With measurable signs of the disease detected through imaging and lab tests, MS can be detected earlier than ever before. In 2024, the international guidelines for MS diagnosis, called the McDonald criteria, went through their most significant overhaul in a decade to reflect those shifts. Dr. Jiwon Oh, Director of the BARLO MS Centre at St. Michael's Hospital, was among the experts who helped to write them.   Now, in a commentary published in Nature Medicine, Dr. Oh has brought together nearly 30 of the world's leading MS clinicians to critically evaluate what those changes mean and where the field must go next.   We sat down with Dr. Oh to understand how MS diagnosis has advanced, the challenges that come with that progress, and the work still ahead.   Read the story: https://lnkd.in/gG24ZhXq

As wildfire smoke once again affects air quality across Ontario, health experts are encouraging Canadians to pay attention to more than just the weather forecast. While smoky skies can be an obvious warning sign, some of the most harmful pollutants are invisible. Fine particulate matter (PM2.5) can travel deep into the lungs and even enter the bloodstream, affecting more than just respiratory health. According to Dr. Samir Gupta, a respirologist and clinician scientist at St. Michael's Hospital and the University of Toronto, poor air quality can increase the risk of flare-ups for people living with asthma, COPD, heart disease and other chronic conditions. Before heading outside, check the Air Quality Health Index (AQHI) and adjust your activities if needed. Knowing the air quality can help you make informed decisions and reduce your exposure to harmful pollutants. Read more: https://lnkd.in/ehpmP-7Q

Canada is uniquely positioned to emerge as a global leader in health data and artificial intelligence, according to Dr. Fahad Razak and Dr. Amol Verma, co-leads of VITAL, the national health data platform developed at St. Michael's Hospital. "Canada already possesses one of the world’s most valuable health-data assets, an unexpected byproduct of two of our most important national ideals," write Drs. Razak and Verma in a recent op-ed for The Globe and Mail. "Our single-payer health system generates comprehensive data across nearly the entire population; decades of immigration, meanwhile, have created one of the most diverse societies on Earth. That combination of diversity and comprehensiveness, across 42 million people, matters enormously for health AI." Read more on how Canada can help shape the next generation of medical advances: https://lnkd.in/gHi5Knqy

Sometimes big medical breakthroughs start with a rock concert. 🎸🎼 Since 2022, ROCK WITH LOVE has raised over $1.1M for the Sarah McComb Award for Cancer Research and helped Dr. Sunit Das uncover why breast cancer spreads to the brain. “The only reason I was able to do any of this was because of the Sarah McComb Award,” Dr. Das says, who was the first winner of the award in its inaugural year. Today, his research is leading to an AI tool that predicts which breast cancer patients are at risk of brain metastasis and when. And it’s all because of the hundreds of people in the Rock with Love community who fill the Opera House every November. Thank you to all of you who show up for the music, for the medical breakthroughs, and for Sarah and St. Mike’s. We’ll see you at this year’s concert on November 7, 2026! 🤘 See how a community united by music is helping change the future of cancer care