Session 4: Learning from COVID-19: Creating High Quality Datasets Across Sectors

Please join us for the fourth session in our seminar series, a panel discussion on the datasets that are getting us through COVID:  What was the need?  How did experts from different sectors come together to fill the need?  What are the challenges?  What are the lessons learned? We will explore these questions and compare across the border – two of our panelists hail from Ontario and will discuss the Science Advisory Table experience and two are from Minnesota and will share their experience with the COVID-19 Hospitalization Tracking Project.

About Our Speakers:

Adalsteinn (Steini) Brown is the Dean of the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto. Prior to becoming Dean, Steini was the Director of the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation and the Dalla Lana Chair of Public Health Policy also at the University. Other past roles include senior leadership roles in policy and strategy within the Ontario Government, founding roles in start-up companies, and extensive work on performance measurement. He received his undergraduate degree in government from Harvard University and his doctorate from the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

Professor Pinar Karaca-Mandic teaches healthcare marketplace and medical technology evaluation. She is the C. Arthur Williams Jr. Professor in Healthcare Risk Management, and the Founding Director of the Business Advancement Center for Health (BACH)  in the Department of Finance. She is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), in Health Economics and Healthcare programs. She also serves as an Associate Editor of Forum for Health Economics and Policy, and an Editorial Board Member for the International Journal of Health Economics and Management.

Dr. Laura Rosella is an epidemiologist, public health expert and Scientific Director of the Population Health Analytics Lab. She is an Associate Professor in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto (U of T), where she holds Canada Research Chair in Population Health Analytics and is the PhD epidemiology program director. In 2020, she was made the Inaugural Stephen Family Research Chair in Community Health at the Institute for Better Health, Trillium Health Partners and Education Lead for the U of T Temerty Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research and Education in Medicine (T-CAIREM). She led several epidemiologic studies during the H1N1 pandemic and currently sits on provincial modelling and evidence tables informing the COVID-19 response.

Fred Trotter is a healthcare data journalist and author. He is a founder of CareSet Systems and The DocGraph Journal, a technical blogger for O’Reilly Radar, and co-author of the first Health IT O’Reilly book Hacking Healthcare. CareSet’s Patch creates a comprehensive map of the healthcare system, by showing how healthcare providers collaborate to deliver healthcare. The DocGraph Journal seeks to create and disseminate new open healthcare data sets, and to foster a community of data scientists who contribute tools and expertise to the analyses of open healthcare data. Fred’s technical commentary and data journalism work has been featured in several online and print journals including Wired, Forbes, U.S. News, NPR, Government Health IT, and Modern Healthcare. As a technology entrepreneur he is an alumni of multiple successful technical startups including Rackspace, Exault (purchased by Verisign), and ClearHealth (the top Open Source EHR company).

Moderator: Avi Goldfarb is the Rotman Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare, and Professor of Marketing at Rotman. Avi is also Chief Data Scientist at the Creative Destruction Lab, Senior Editor at Marketing Science, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research on the economics of technology has been discussed in White House reports, Congressional testimony, European Commission documents, the Economist, the Globe and Mail, the National Post, CBC Radio, National Public Radio, Forbes, the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. Along with Ajay Agrawal and Joshua Gans, Avi is the author of the Globe & Mail bestselling book Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence.

Watch Video Recording here