Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

The purpose of this project is to develop predictive analytics and business intelligence tools that can be integrated into the decision support system being developed by the healthcare partner; Alpha Global IT as a module of the their flagship electronic Medical Record, Globemed. Alpha Global IT is committed to the development of advanced healthcare IT solutions that utilize predictive analysis and business intelligence in order to improve the quality of healthcare for patients within the Province and Nationwide. Predictive analytics and modeling tools will be used to ""stratify"" the population, identify at-risk patients, provide better provision screening tests, and identify gaps in care. In this particular research, the research team tackle the following tasks that are of interest to the Healthcare partner: (1) developing predictive analytics and modeling tools that utilize Bayesian networks to forecast the load on the healthcare system in terms of the projections for new incidences of cancer. These predictive models can hence be used to provide insight into the resources needed by the healthcare system in order to effectively manage the projected cancer occurrences and provide the level of care needed, (2) extend Alpha Global IT's nonlinear optimization tools through the introduction evolutionary computation methods in order to create a scheduling tool for improved allocation of clinical resources. This tool can be used to achieve healthcare organization performance targets (required number of procedures, wait time requirements, geographic locations, etc.). Business intelligence tools are needed at the point of care, so physicians can quickly interpret data, define ""health interventions,"" and support actions such as specialist referrals, and disease management. On this front, this research program plans to introduce novel tools for adaptive information extraction from clinical records to help create evidence for best practice. Such adaptive information extraction tools will be a key feature of the clinical decision support system introduced by the healthcare partner.