Centre for Health Informatics

Meet our CHI Communications Team! From left to right, Graphic Designer Lexi, Operations & Development Specialist Erin, Research and Communications Lead Katelyn. We’ve been busy with internal events but you’ll be hearing more from us soon!

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, tech industry is racing to develop apps as well as wearable devices to help people to trace contacts, to self-assess, and to self-monitor the development of COVID-19 cases. In the meantime, advanced information technologies enabled our healthcare providers and government officials to compile a great amount of COVID-19 information and data. The oceans of data are mostly disconnected. Studies has shown that the COVID-19 data from all sources provides critical and essential evidences to predict outbreaks, early sign of COVID-19 infection, recommendations for effective response and control of the epidemic, and many more useful knowledge related to COVID-19. Enlightened by data and empowered by cloud computing, the main objective of this project is to provide evidence-based real-time and accurate monitoring and prediction of COVID-19 outbreaks as well as recommendations for preventing and controlling the COVID-19 epidemic. Toward this objective, we propose a COVID-19 AI (augmented-intelligence) system to unleash the power of data in addressing the epidemic challenges. The system fuses data from reliable and approved sources and performs deep analysis and learning on harvested data using machine learning techniques. By directly connecting to data sources and by utilizing advanced technologies, the COVID-19 AI system provides real-time and accurate picture of the COVID-19 spread at the community level. The augmented intelligence also provides evidence-based early detection and community-based surveillance of COVID-19 outbreaks. The system essentially turns data into actionable insights and unites patients, healthcare providers, COVID-19 researchers, and government officials to combat COVID-19 together.

Dr. Tyler Williamson, will be stepping in as Acting Director of CHI, as Dr. Hude Quan is stepping down due to personal reasons. We thank Hude for his instrumental work in creating CHI and growing the Centre to what it is today; we look forward to our continued work with Dr. Quan’s research program as he stays on as Faculty Member at CHI.

Dr. Williamson made many impacts as Associate Director specifically working on Fund Development, the Health Data Science and Biostatistics Program, team development, and everything to do with the Covid-19 Pandemic advising and CHI Covid Tracker.

We are so pleased to introduce Tyler as our Acting Director and are looking forward to the great work he will do in the future!

A team of University of Calgary researchers, led by Cu***ng School of Medicine (CSM) researcher Dr. Michelle Keir, MD, is tackling racial and gender inequities in the field of cardiology. The goal of the team is to create a more equitable, diverse and inclusive environment for both patients and care providers.

The team recently completed a review of the published literature on equity and diversity among cardiac physicians and summarized the challenges faced by women and racial-minority physicians in the field. Their findings were published in CJC Open.

Meet Bing Li, our AHS SPOR Data Team Lead here at the Centre for Health Informatics.

Bing also holds the position as Team Lead - HRMA with Alberta Health Services Analytics.
He holds his MA in Economics from the University of Calgary.

His research interests focus on methodology in health services. He is an experienced SAS programmer with strong data mining skills and proficient in SAS Macro language and SQL.