Judy Hodgson is no stranger to looking for health information online. When her husband Allan Whitehead was diagnosed several years ago with heart failure, she Googled the condition, finding snippets of information on various websites to piece together an understanding of what he was experiencing and how he would be treated for this condition.

Today there’s no need for Judy to visit multiple websites to find information about heart failure – while waiting at St. Joseph’s Health Centre’s Heart Function Clinic, she now just scrolls through a new online resource that has the latest information she needs to answer her questions and help inform the conversation she and her husband are about to have with their cardiologist.

The Ted Rogers Heart Failure Patient Education website (www.tedrogersheartfunction.ca) is a brand new resource developed by a St. Joe’s physician in partnership with the Peter Munk Cardiac Centre, University Health Network and the Ted Rogers Centre for Heart Research that is changing the way people get their health information.

“If you know what you’re looking for you can go searching on your own and find this stuff, but it’s a question of whether you get all of the information you need,” says Judy.  “Anything that consolidates information into one good resource is helpful. And if you bookmark the website, it’s easy to go back and find something – it’s all in one place.”

In the past year, our Heart Function Clinic saw more than 1,100 visits from patients and their families who had questions about their condition and long-term effects. The news of a diagnosis can be unexpected and information that is shared during the first few conversations between patients and their doctors can be difficult and overwhelming to absorb.

“We wanted a resource that patients could access on their own, when they were ready to learn more about their diagnosis,” says Dr. Peter Mitoff, a cardiologist at St. Joe’s who was the lead physician on the website. “We spoke with patients and the feedback we got was that they didn’t want to read about heart failure – they wanted to be able to visualize what’s happening in their body.”

The bright, bold website shares information through text, diagrams and videos. It provides a comprehensive look at what heart failure is, how it’s caused, what the treatments are and how someone with heart failure can live a healthy life.

“This is amazing for us as educators,” says Jennifer Comello, Registered Nurse in our Heart Function Clinic. “We’re working to make this available on all patient monitors at bedsides so when we’re meeting with patients in the clinic or in their rooms, we can actually show them what we’re talking about; this will be so beneficial in terms of helping them understand their health condition and how to manage their diagnosis. Patients can also use the videos to talk about heart failure with their family when they go home.”

This website is an exciting patient education resource that is helping to innovate and redesign our patient experience by giving people the tools they need, where they need them, to help manage their health conditions.

This is just one of the many patient education resources being developed by our teams. Teaching and education is deeply ingrained in everything we do at St. Joe’s – learn more about our other initiatives by visiting our website (www.stjoestoronto.ca).