University Health Network

UHN began as a 1986 merger of Toronto Western Hospital and Toronto General Hospital into The Toronto Hospital; Princess Margaret joined in 1998 and the combined institution took the name University Health Network in 1999, with the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute added in 2011. Today it describes itself as 10 sites and more than 20,000 members of TeamUHN, fully affiliated with the University of Toronto. Two of its innovation groups have taken the HealthTO stage. Joe Cafazzo, who leads Healthcare Human Factors, spent his 2018 talk arguing that hospitals keep buying bad software — he called electronic health records "kind of like stepping back into the 90s" and tied their interfaces to physician burnout — and said his lab had by then spent 15 years running usability testing on health technology, including on products he had helped create himself. A year earlier Lora Appel, then a postdoctoral fellow at OpenLab, UHN's design and innovation shop inside Toronto General, made the opposite-facing argument: that innovation in healthcare is overrated because implementation is undervalued, in an environment she described as institutional, siloed, risk-averse and historically technophobic.