Centre for Health Informatics

Join us Wednesday September 28 at 12pm for a virtual information session on our Statistics Canada Research Data Centre at Foothills campus. Learn about the data and how to access it!

Meet Robb Price, our Senior Advisor of Commercialization here at the Centre for Health Informatics.

Recognized as one of Calgary’s Top 40-Under-40 for success in Calgary’s business and social sectors, Robb has had a lifelong interest in technology and health. In recent years, Robb has been involved in launching health technology start-ups in the areas of monitoring normative brain function and COVID-19 symptom screening/cohort management. Robb studied business and computer science at the University of Oregon and moved on to pursue a life as a serial entrepreneur. He has lots of stories of both success and failure in the start-up world!

Robb’s combined interest in health and technology has intersected at CHI. After working on a project with CHI Director, Tyler Williamson, he was intrigued by the vast opportunities to benefit Canadian public health through commercialization of projects at CHI. Robb and his wife Ceilidh have three children and recently moved to an acreage in the Alberta Foothills. They all enjoy spending time exploring the outdoors. In his spare time you may find Robb strumming the guitar next to a campfire or attending his children’s hockey or basketball games.

Fun fact: Robb was in an episode of Beverly Hills 90210 when he was 15 and spent a lot of his youth on film and television sets!

Tyler is a member of the O’Brien Institute of Public Health and the Alberta Children’s Hospital Research Institute, as well as an Associate Professor of Biostatistics in the Department of Community Health Sciences and the Director of the Health Data Science and Biostatistics Diploma Program.

Tyler’s educational background consists of a BSc Statistics at UofC ’05, and a PhD Biostatistics UofC ’11. He received NAPCRG New Investigator Award in 2018 for outstanding work as new primary care investigator within the North American Primary Care Research Group (the largest primary care research organization in the world).

Tyler’s research interests include health data integration, chronic disease surveillance and research using electronic medical record data, and non-canonical link functions for binomial generalized linear models. But really, data isn’t Tyler’s passion it’s the good that can be done for his family, loved ones, and the general population that being able to work with data in this way offers. In his spare time, Tyler is involved with his church and spends his time exploring the outdoors with his 4 kids and wife, Heather!

Centre for Health Informatics (CHI) is so pleased to announce Dr. Tyler Williamson as the new director of CHI. The CSM and CHI thank the outgoing and inaugural Director, Dr. Hude Quan, for his success in the role. Stay tuned for more about Tyler and his research!

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!

The Centre for Health Informatics helps researchers access data, and carry out ethical research processes. Our centre helps ensure accuracy in science and public health education.

At the Centre for Health Informatics, we aim to make data more readily accessible to researchers.

Through partnerships with AHS and other external collaborators, CHI is able to facilitate access to high quality, relevant data that can be used to support research and drive innovations.

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.

Meet Tyler Williamson, our Acting Director here at the Centre for Health Informatics.

Tyler is a member of the O’Brien Institute of Public Health and the Alberta Children’s Hospital Research Institute, as well as an Associate Professor of Biostatistics in the Department of Community Health Sciences and the Director of the Health Data Science and Biostatistics Diploma Program.

Tyler’s educational background consists of a BSc Statistics at UofC ’05, and a PhD Biostatistics UofC ’11. He received NAPCRG New Investigator Award in 2018 for outstanding work as new primary care investigator within the North American Primary Care Research Group (the largest primary care research organization in the world).

Tyler’s research interests include health data integration, chronic disease surveillance and research using electronic medical record data, and non-canonical link functions for binomial generalized linear models. But really, data isn’t Tyler’s passion it’s the good that can be done for his family, loved ones, and the general population that being able to work with data in this way offers. In his spare time, Tyler is involved with his church and spends his time exploring the outdoors with his 4 kids and wife, Heather!

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.