Saturday, April 26, 2025

As a senior citizen, Mountain Cablevision founder Owen Boris had health complications, and dealing with the local health system led to worse problems. He decided that Hamilton needed its own Mayo clinic, and went to work with hospital executives to make it happen. Today, the first phase of the Boris Clinic officially opened at McMaster University Medical Centre.

It feels like a home for Christina Ingrassia, who has been shuttling from one specialist to another since she was 15 and diagnosed with diabetes. “It just becomes overwhelming. It becomes your whole life. You shuffle yourself from place to place, this appointment, that appointment, and all you end up doing is going through reports.”

Their children say that was the frustration Owen and Marta Boris faced.

Jackie Work: “They ran around to different specialists, appointments months apart, there was no coordination of diagnosis or treatment, no resolution to the problems.”

Les Boris: “You get side effects from one specialist and because the specialists weren’t talking, it led to more complications.”

In 2012, a year after Owen Boris died, his family donated $30 million to the hospital — mostly for stem cell research, but 6 million was earmarked for this clinic “so patients can be seen, treated, investigated at the same visit by multiple physicians,” says clinic medical director Akbar Panju.

For the first time in the hospital, all the clinic computers will share information, so different physicians will access the same patient records. Add to that advanced technology for teaching and research — like a plastic patient that can be programmed with different heart and lung defects.

“We have about 10 of these, so whomever’s doing the exam, everyone else can hear. everyone’s engaged.”

A fitting legacy for a man who helped engineer the Avro Arrow — and was a North American cable TV pioneer.

“My dad pushed hard, whatever he did, he wouldn’t take no for an answer.”