A new era of health care is unfolding, shaped by smarter technologies, more connected care teams, and treatments once thought impossible. Meeting this moment will take more than incremental change: It will take a hospital built for what comes next, where world-class care and discovery move side by side, and it will take a health-care system that’s integrated within the community.
That is the focus of The Ottawa Hospital Foundation’s $500-million Campaign to Create Tomorrow, a once-in-a-generation effort to help reshape health care in our region and extend the impact far beyond our city.
At the heart of the campaign is a new campus with a focus on enhancing the patient experience through technology, improved patient flow, and spaces that support patients, their loved ones, and the teams who care for them. Purposeful design elements, including single-patient rooms and accessible and thoughtfully planned spaces, will help improve comfort, privacy, safety, and wellness.
With advanced digital tools embedded into care, the hospital will connect patients, clinicians, and medical information in ways that will support more timely decisions and a more seamless experience from admission to recovery.
Innovation at The Ottawa Hospital doesn’t stop at the design and planning of the new campus, according to President and CEO Cameron Love. “We don’t view innovation as a project or a building,” he says. “In health care, it’s how we rethink delivering care and bring the brightest minds together to turn new ideas into better care for our community.”
The hospital is also proudly among the top in the country for research, with discoveries that improve lives locally and for patients around the world. More than 25 years ago, The Ottawa Hospital helped pioneer a radical approach: embedding clinicians in laboratories, side-by-side with researchers, so breakthroughs can move faster from the lab to the bedside.
This model continues today and has played a role in strengthening the hospital’s ability to lead the way in various areas of cutting-edge research. One example of this is The Ottawa Hospital’s Biotherapeutics Manufacturing Centre (BMC), Canada’s most experienced and successful facility of its kind. The BMC has produced more than 20 cell- and virus-based therapies for human clinical trials in Canada, the U.S., Europe, and Asia. This integration of the research ecosystem with patient care is fundamental to The Ottawa Hospital.
As the Foundation’s President and CEO Tim Kluke notes, “The Campaign to Create Tomorrow is an opportunity for us to change the course of health care for our city, for generations, through philanthropy. I think future citizens will look back and realize that we understood the significance of this moment.”
Supported by a community of caregivers, innovators, and donors, The Ottawa Hospital is building a future where extraordinary people, empowered by extraordinary technology and research, can deliver extraordinary care.
This article first appeared in the Executive Report on Health Innovation in the June Magazine produced by the Ottawa Business Journal. That publication is available in it’s digital format below:
