The Cardiac Arrhythmia Network of Canada (CANet) is a pan-Canadian organization. Our members are patients, caregivers, investigators, and healthcare providers. We partner with academic institutions, globally recognized industries, not-for-profit organizations, and federal and provincial government agencies.
These unique relationships combine patient engagement, arrhythmia research, digital health advancements, innovation, and commercialization activities to develop and distribute cutting-edge scientific discoveries and technologies to improve cardiac arrhythmia patients’ lives and create business opportunities.
Scroll down to see highlights, learn about our impacts, and discover more about our network initiatives.
CANet Patient Partner Tim Westhaver lives with an inherited heart disease called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM).
Abnormal genes have thickened his heart muscles, interfering with its electrical rhythms and making it more difficult for the organ to pump blood. There are few visible symptoms. The most devastating consequence is sudden cardiac death.
During his lifetime, Tim has lost several of his family members to HCM. His mother died of it when he was six weeks old, his oldest brother passed away as an adult, and two nephews died suddenly.
“Don’t live your life by other people’s standards. Live it by yours.”
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Dr. Anthony Tang envisions a not-so-distant future where sensors, voice recognition, cloud-computing and data analytics are a routine part of our health care experience. “The grand vision is that we can make a diagnosis, follow a patient’s progress and allow management to occur wherever they are,” said Tang. “This is about empowering patients in their own health care.” As the Scientific Director and CEO of the Cardiac Arrhythmia Network of Canada (CANet) housed at Western University, Tang is focused on innovative solutions to help patients manage complex medical conditions.
Collaborating with investigators across the country, CANet is leading the expansion, testing and clinical integration of a digital health platform called VIRTUES (Virtual Integrated Reliable Transformative User-Driven E-health System).
With our vision of patient-driven care for all Canadians, along with ground-breaking CANet-funded research, we continue to assemble innovative digital health technologies.
Apart from VIRTUES, our patient-centred virtual care platform, several of our successful research programs have a global impact. View some of our recent project highlights below. To learn more about all impacts made by our Network, click here.
One of the first programs funded by CANet and the largest clinical trial of its kind, EARLY-AF, found that there was a significantly lower rate of atrial fibrillation recurrence with catheter cryoballoon ablation than with antiarrhythmic drug therapy. The results of this study have recently been published in the New England Journal of Medicine with numerous invited presentations at national/international conferences.
CANet reported the first-ever test flights of drone-delivered AEDs in Canada in simulated mock 9-1-1 responses. The chances of surviving a cardiac arrest decrease by 7 to 10 % for every minute over 10 minutes. This novel, innovative delivery system has significantly reduced the time to AED arrival at the scene of a cardiac arrest from 20 minutes to 10.6 minutes in rural regions.
CANet-funded C-SCAN successfully advocated for a mandatory AED registry in Ontario and helped draft legislation to create a mandatory Provincial AED registry, Bill 141 Defibrillator Registration and Public Access Act, 2020. This legislation received royal assent in June 2020.
CANet has been federally funded in part by Canada’s flagship science and technology program, Networks of Centres of Excellence (NCE) of Canada. The Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry at Western University is the proud partner host of our network.
