Achievements
in TAVI

Over the past 12 years, philanthropic support for the transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) program at Sunnybrook’s Schulich Heart Program has enabled the team to provide life-saving care to even more patients.

“We see the Schulich Heart Program as a living laboratory,” says program chief Dr. Harindra Wijeysundera, who has chaired the TAVI working group of the Minimally Invasive Structural Heart Committee for Ontario and is leading the development of a new funding model for aortic valve disease. “We are early adopters of new technology, and we use our leadership to demonstrate how such innovations can and should become part of our health-care system.”

Dr. Wijeysundera and his team are eager to replicate the truly unique success they have had in TAVI.

We’ve gone from being one of the first centres in Canada to perform the procedure to becoming leaders in determining and advocating for health-care policy for the device at a provincial, national and, in some areas, international level,” says Dr. Wijeysundera.

Since the program’s launch, the team has produced 113 peer-reviewed publications, a national quality report and provincial reports on TAVI, and participated in a number of large scale studies to investigate its use in moderate and lower-risk patients.