The Informatics and Communication Technologies (ICT) Core focuses on integrating hardware and software solutions for the storage, retrieval, sharing and manipulation management, analysis, visualization, interpretation and useof information for health service delivery and translational research. Solutions developed in this core utilize internet and mobile technologies to provide health care providers and patients with systems to visualize, analyze, communicate and transfer information.
Through Techna ICT advances in quality, safety, personalized medicine and research are realized at the point of care.
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Faculty Members Associated with this Core
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Techna Co-Director, Communication & Knowledge Transfer; Professor, Dept. of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation; Senior Scientist at the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation, University Health NetworkGunther Eysenbach is a Senior Scientist at the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation at the Toronto Research Institute/Toronto General Hospital and Division of Medical Decision Making and Health Care Research. He also holds an academic appointment as Professor at the Department of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation, University of Toronto, and is Visiting Professor at the Department of Behavioral Sciences at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. He studied medicine in Munich and Freiburg in German, and obtained a Master in Public Health from Harvard University. Dr Eysenbach is recognized by many as one of the leading researchers in the field of eHealth, consumer health informatics, and Internet & Medicine. He is author of a textbook for computers in medicine (which he wrote at the age of 24), editor of a loose-leaf book on computers for physicians, founding publisher and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Medical Internet Research, a leading global eHealth journal. Dr. Eysenbach has authored more than 120 publications, including almost 40 book-chapters as well as several pioneer studies and comments on cybermedicine, e-health and Consumer health informatics, published in respected international journals such as JAMA, BMJ, and the Lancet. He founded and headed the first research group on cybermedicine and eHealth worldwide at the University of Heidelberg between 1999 and 2001, where his main research interest was consumer health informatics, and came to Canada in March 2002 to help building up the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation in Toronto. The research group at the Centre led by Dr. Eysenbach is pursuing projects from a wide area of disciplines including consumer health informatics, population health technology, usability of ehealth systems, electronic and Open Access publishing, knowledge synthesis and knowledge translation. The Internet plays a central role in most of his projects. His group is applying methods from the behavioral sciences, public health and clinical epidemiology, human factors engineering, and artificial intelligence (semantic web, natural language processing) to the design and evaluation of medical Internet and eHealth applications. Specific areas of interest are technology applications for behavior change, and mobile applications and social media / Web 2.0 applications for health professionals and consumers. A current CIHR-funded project dealt with mining and analyzing twitter data collected during the H1N1 pandemic to research the application of social media and mhealth for public health, and was featured in the CIHR annual report 2011. Other projects include a Personal Health Record (PHR) cum self-tracking project for the "quantified self" community dubbed "Healthbook", and an exploratory project to give patients at UHN access to portions of the health records through Microsoft Healthvault / Telus Healthspace. As Co-Director for Communications and Knowledge Transfer at Techna he has an interest in research social networking and expertise mining, is leading the development of the Techna website, and is heading an epublishing unit within Techna (dubbed UHN epress). Dr. Eysenbach has received numerous awards and distinctions. He has been called “one of the most productive researchers, editors, and publishers in the online health field.” (Ferguson Report's Distinguished Achievement Award) and in 2004 received the Janssen-Cilag Future Award, referred to as the German "health care Nobel prize". In addition, Dr. Eysenbach's pioneering work on "Infodemiology", presented at the 2006 AMIA Annual Fall Conference in Washington D.C. in November, won a Distinguished Paper Award. In 2011, he was inducted as fellow into the prestigious American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI), an achievement which represents "recognition by peers of sustained and significant contributions to the field of biomedical informatics" and an honor which he shares with only a handful of other Canadiansr.active 1 week, 6 days ago -
Canada Research Chair in eHealth Innovation; Faculty, Informatics Communications and Technology, Techna Institute; Professor, University of TorontoDr. Jadad is a physician, educator, researcher and public advocate, whose mission is to help improve health and wellness for all, thorough information and communication technologies (ICTs). He has been called a «human Internet», as his research and innovation work seeks to identify and connect the best minds, the best knowledge and the best tools across traditional boundaries to eliminate unnecessary suffering. Such work focuses on a radical 'glocal' innovation model designed to improve the capacity of humans to imagine, create and promote new and better approaches to living, healing, working and learning across the world. Powered by social networks and other leading-edge telecommunication tools, his projects attempt to anticipate and respond to major public health threats (e.g., multiple chronic conditions, pandemics) through strong and sustainable international collaboration, and to enable the public (particularly young people) to shape the health system and society. Born and educated in Colombia, he obtained his medical degree in 1986, specializing in anesthesiology. By the time he was 20 years of age and still a medical student, he became a leading medical expert on crack cocaine in Colombia and an internationally sought after speaker. In 1990 he joined the University of Oxford (Balliol College), where he became one of the first physicians in the world with a doctorate in health knowledge synthesis. He developed new methods to distill high-quality health-related information and to build specialized bibliographic databases to support health-related decisions. He led the development of the most widely used tool to assess the quality of clinical trials (‘the Jadad scale’), now used throughout the world. His work helped fuel the development of the Cochrane Collaboration, a global network of individuals who are synthesizing over 500,000 clinical trials in all areas of health. In 1995, he moved to Canada and joined McMaster University, where he was Chief of the Health Information Research Unit; Director of the McMaster Evidence-based Practice Centre; Co-Director of the Canadian Cochrane Network and Centre; Associate Medical Director of the Program in Evidence-based Care for Cancer Care Ontario and Professor in the Department of Clinical Epidemiology & Biostatistics. In 2000, Alex moved to Toronto, where he led the creation of the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation, a setting designed as a simulator of the future, to study and optimize the use of ICTs before their widespread introduction into the health system and society at large. He is also spearheading the development of the Global People-centred eHealth Innovation Network, a unique group of individuals, organizations, tools and facilities working in harmony to promote research, development, education, policy, funding, recognition and commercialization activities related to the uses of ICTs to promote optimal levels of health and wellness, worldwide. He also convenes the People, Health equity and Innovation (PHI) Group at the University of Toronto, which focuses on efforts to level the playing field for disadvantaged members of society, with emphasis on youth leadership development (focusing on the role that students could play to re-shape health and educational systems), supportive care (for people with chronic conditions, terminal illnesses or advanced age, and their caregivers) and the promotion of a culture of multiculturalism, worldwide. From 2004 to 2009, he was Founding Chair of the Board of the Foundation of the Institute for Innovation on Human Wellbeing, in Andalusia, Spain, overseeing the development of a centre and large-scale projects designed to re-create every aspect of human life, including homes, workplaces, learning spaces and multi-cultural communities. The Institute is one of the core driving elements of a €15-billion effort to enable Andalusia to transform its universities, corporations and community-based organizations, becoming a major world player in the Knowledge Age. In 2006, Dr. Jadad became a senior advisor to the Andalusian and Spanish governments, participating in high-level strategic discussions with recognized leaders such as Mikhail Gorbachev, Bob Geldof, Kofi Annan, Rigoberta Menchu and Al Gore. Dr. Jadad was also the founding President of the Spanish eHealth Foundation (he is now President Emeritus), which enabled the creation of the Spanish eHealth Network and Revista eSalud, the leading academic journal and portal in the Hispanic world focused on eHealth [www.revistaesalud.com]. In 2005, he was invited by the World Health Organization to act as the representative for the American continent, sitting as a member of its Global Observatory for eHealth’s Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE). Dr. Jadad has received numerous awards, including a 'National Health Research Scholars Award', by Health Canada (1997), one of 'Canada's Top 40 Under 40' awards (1998), a 'Premier's Research Excellence Award' (1999), the New Pioneers Award in Science and Technology (2002). In 2001 and 2002, he was featured by Time Magazine as one of the new Canadians who will shape the country in the 21st century, and as one of the leading medical researchers in the country. In 2004, he received the Canadian Latin Achievement Award, as one of the people who have made important contributions to the relationship between Canada and the Hispanic world. In 2005, he was selected by the Top 40 Under 40 alumni as one of “The Best of the Best” for achievements in Health and Science, and by his peers in Colombia as the scientist who probably has had the greatest impact in the country’s history. In 2006, he received the Distinguished Lecturer Award from Health Canada’s Chief Scientist for his contributions to health and the health system. In 2007, he was invited by the British Medical Journal to author the article on the impact of computers on humanity, which was published in a commemorative issue that featured the top 15 breakthroughs since 1840, when the journal was published for the first time. In 2007, Dr. Jadad became the first Hispanic Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, and was selected by media and community leaders as one of Canada’s “10 most influential Hispanic Canadians”. In 2008, he received the Order of the Congress (equivalent to the Order of Canada) and the Jose Maria Cordoba Medal in his native Colombia, and published his first non-medical book (sixth in total), entitled Unlearning*. In this book, he provides a guided tour through the evolution of the human mind, ending with a view of the greatest challenges humans face at the dawn of the 21st century, and his own obituary. In 2009, he became the Chair of the Canadian Association for People-centred Health’s Academic Research Collaborative, and of the Global People-centred eHealth Innovation Network, two initiatives that promote collaborative efforts across traditional boundaries designed to enable the health system to meet the needs of people in the age of the Internet and global telecommunications. In 2010, Dr. Jadad chaired and convened the Global People-centred eHealth Innovation Forum during the European Ministerial eHealth Conference, and the International Forum "Youth-led Innovation and Entrepreneurship" in Brussels and Extremadura (Spain), two events designed to promote collaborative efforts among leading groups interested in optimizing human health and wellbeing through the innovative use of ICTs in all regions of the world. In late 2010, he co-chaired the First International Summit on Human-centred and Family-focused eHealth in China, becoming the Chair of the International Advisory Committee on eHealth of the Beijing Institute of Technology in 2011. He is the editor-in-chief of the first global, interactive, co-created and live book on polypathology (when people live with multiple chronic diseases), a challenge that remains poorly understood while accounting for over 60% of the health expenditures in most countries**. This effort led to the emergence of 10 global communities that are pursuing collaborative projects to tackle some of the most pressing challenges to the sustainability of the health system, while promoting optimal levels of healing and wellbeing throughout the world.active 1 month ago -
Co-Lead, Informatics and Communications Technology, Techna Institute; Associate Professor, University of Toronto; Senior Scientist, Ontario Cancer InstituteDr. Igor Jurisica is a Senior Scientist at the Ontario Cancer Institute, University Health Network, Associate Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Medical Biophysics, University of Toronto, Adjunct Professor at the School of Computer Science, Queen's University, and a Visiting Scientist at the IBM Centre for Advanced Studies. He earned his Dipl Ing degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Slovak Technical University in 1991, MSc and PhD in Computer Science from the University of Toronto in 1993 and 1998, respectively. He currently holds a TIER I Canada Research Chair in Integrative Cancer Informatics. Dr Jurisica's research focuses on integrative computational biology, and representation, analysis and visualization of high dimensional data generated by high-throughput biology experiments, in the context of Cancer Informatics. Of particular interest is the use of comparative analysis for the mining of integrated different datasets such as protein-protein interaction, gene expression profiling, and high-throughput screens for protein crystallization.active 3 months, 2 weeks ago -
Co-Lead, Informatics and Communications Technology, Techna Institute; Chief Medical Information Officer, University Health Network & SIMS Partnership; Associate Professor of Medicine, University of TorontoDr. Rossos is currently the Chief Medical Information Officer at the University Health Network and an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Toronto. He serves on a number of committees including the Clinical Advisory Committee for The Colorectal Cancer Screening Program of the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long Term Care (MOHLTC), and the Professional Advisory Committee of the Ontario Telemedicine Network (OTN). He co-chairs the University Health Network Electronic Health Record Clinical Advisory Committee reporting to the Medical Advisory Committee. Dr. Rossos received his M.D. from the University of Toronto in 1986, where he subsequently completed his Internal Medicine, Gastroenterology training, and therapeutic endoscopy fellowship. He studied Leadership Development for Physicians in Academic Health Centers at the Harvard School of Public Health in 2004, and graduated from the Executive MBA Program at the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management as a Bregman Scholar in June, 2008. He has achieved international recognition for his innovation and leadership in informatics and telehealth, chairs and serves on a number of local and national committees while holding executive positions within the Centers for Global eHealth and Innovation in Complex Care (CICC) at UHN. His educational contributions have been formally recognized with the W.H. Anderson Teaching Award from The Toronto Hospital in 1995-6, the University of Toronto Louis J. Cole Faculty Teaching Award for excellence in the field of gastroenterology in June, 2007, and the University Health Network/Mount Sinai Teacher of the Year Award for 2007-2008. During his recent term as Program Director of the University of Toronto Division of Gastroenterology he successfully introduced a curriculum including an interactive website and videoconferenced teaching rounds to support the internationally recognized multi-site academic program. He successfully completed his term as Chair of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada Gastroenterology Examination Board in September, 2006 overseeing the merger of the Royal College and Collège des médecins du Québec (CMQ) while completely revising the examination process to include an examination blue print, a standardized patient program, and a multi-media OSCE (Objective Structured Clinical Examination) format to improve the objectivity and fairness of the examination.active 5 months, 2 weeks ago
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