High tech and high touch
Alex Jadad and Co. are bringing health care into the information age.
In 1982, as a third-year medical student in Bogota, Colombia, Alex Jadad had a life-changing experience.
Asked to speak with children about health, he found that they wanted to talk about narcotics. “I was horrified to realize how little I knew. Here were kids in the second and third grades who knew more than I did.”
Of particular interest to the children was what was then called “basuco” – which we now know as “crack.” “Even at my medical school, nobody knew much about it. And this was in Colombia, which was already a world leader in the illegal drug trade. There was a mammoth gap between what the public wanted and what we as health professionals were getting. That gap, which is still present today, has bothered me ever since.”
Jadad went on to earn his MD with a specialty in anaesthesiology and pain relief. Then, fueled by his desire to get health information out to the public, he earned a PhD in “knowledge synthesis” – the management of huge amounts of health information – at Oxford University. After spending five years at McMaster University, he moved to the University of Toronto and the University Health Network (UHN) in 2000 to put his communications ideas into practice.
The obstacle to overcome, he feels, is bringing the health care system up to speed with the rest of society. “The health system has been slow to react to the information age. We need to accelerate its transformation so that people can access the information and services they need, regardless of who or where they are.”
To accomplish this, Jadad – who has twice been recognized by Time magazine as one of the country’s top young innovators – is using investment from the Canada Research Chairs program, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, and the Ontario Innovation Trust to establish the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation, a joint project between U of T and UHN.
Through the Centre – which is located at UHN’s Toronto General Hospital site – Jadad is bringing together a team of experts in social sciences, information technology, engineering and health sciences to explore the impact of virtual reality, portable and wearable computers, telemedicine, eLearning, integrated information systems and new methods to study eHealth innovations. Some of the team’s projects include:
A Virtual Clinic, which explores how communication and information exchange between the public and the health system could influence decision making, organization of services, resource utilization and health outcomes
A “mini-model of the world” project, in which over 2,000 people from more than 90 countries are joining forces to explore the role that eHealth innovations could
play in addressing common health challenges such as fighting cancer, pain control and end-of-life care
A project to help people who belong to underserved groups (because of literacy, socio-economic or cultural factors) to gain information about supportive care services
But Jadad’s work isn’t only concerned with the e-side of things. A recognized expert in pain management, he holds the Rose Chair in Supportive Care, which focuses on how to help patients, their families and health professionals deal with needs throughout the health care spectrum. “It’s high-touch with the Rose Family Chair and high-tech with the Chair in eHealth Innovation and the Centre. This is what we’re trying to achieve with our research – combine the high-tech with the high-touch. That’s the way health care should be.”