Gabriel Ho: The Volunteer Turning Echoes into Impact
On weekday mornings, Gabriel reads the heart in grayscale—steady hand, quiet room, valves opening and closing like tiny doors in a storm. By evening, he’s reading a different pulse: comments that surge, links that stall, a graph that breathes with each post. The tools change from probe to phone, but the instinct is the same—find the signal, make it clear, move it where it needs to go.
A registered cardiac sonographer at Sunnybrook, Gabriel gives MTIMA what every mission needs and few know how to build: attention you can trust. He doesn’t chase virality; he edits for clarity. Dense echo concepts become one-minute lessons that travel—what a murmur means, why blood pressure matters at 3 a.m., when chest pain can’t wait. Since he took the reins on MTIMA’s social channels, engagement has risen 50%, and attendance at online sessions has doubled—not as confetti, but as proof that the right message has found the right readers.
Gabriel Ho RDCS
There’s a balance sheet to this kind of work. To buy the same reach with ads, you’d spend roughly CAD $6–$12 per 1,000 impressions. A modest campaign wave around 100,000 impressions—the territory MTIMA now touches organically—would run about CAD $600–$1,200. Gabriel’s campaigns deliver that without a dollar of ad spend. His time is capital, too: even a conservative 8–12 volunteer hours a week—strategy, scripting, production—would bill at CAD $45–$85 an hour in Toronto, an in-kind contribution worth ~CAD $1,400–$4,000 a month. In a nonprofit budget, those numbers don’t just add up; they free up.
What makes it work isn’t wizardry; it’s method. Gabriel treats communication like quality improvement: test, measure, revise. He swaps jargon for metaphors that hold—an incompetent valve becomes a door that won’t seal; a thickened septum, a hallway narrowed by new walls. The science stays intact, the panic drops, the lesson lands. Webinars that once dragged now move like a ward round: a tricky apical view, a live measurement, a debrief in plain language. Between sessions he scripts handouts, polishes case vignettes, and watches a small analytics dashboard the way he watches a Doppler trace—looking for noise he can smooth.
One of Gabriel’s work.
“It’s not just about giving back, but about pushing forward,” Gabriel says. “If someone scrolls away knowing one thing they didn’t five seconds ago—what symptom to watch, what test to ask about—that’s a win.” Multiply that win across thousands of views and you get clinic-day dividends: fewer repeat scans because the prep was clear, cleaner referrals because a pathway thread popped at the right moment, steadier visits because patients arrived ready.
Colleagues call it translation, not performance. He isn’t staging a brand; he’s building a bridge—between the language of TTEs and LVOTs and the places people actually live: phones, commutes, late nights at the kitchen table. MTIMA’s feeds (LinkedIn homepage; and Instagram, @missionmtima) read less like a bulletin board now and more like a classroom with the door propped open.
None of this asks for fanfare, which suits Gabriel fine. The spotlight lands instead on what the numbers suggest: attention becoming understanding, understanding becoming action. That’s the quiet magic of this work. In the morning, he finds the heart. At night, he helps it speak.