Grant: Health System Impact Fellowships - Post-Doctoral in Equitable AI/PPH 2-year

With the emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases and rising burden of chronic diseases, it is critical to improve prevention, control and management of disease by using innovative and cost-effective solutions. Given the large amount of digital data generated as part of patient interactions with the healthcare system, most of which is in the form of notes, text analytics and natural language processing (NLP) techniques can support detection, management, and long term follow-up of patients, thus allowing health systems to improve upon patient wellness. The BCCDC and UBC Data Science Institute have partnered with the goal of applying text analytics and NLP techniques to identify useful information for informing health policy and the design of health services. This proposed HSIF program of work will examine big text data including laboratory results, medical notes, and discussion forum data with objectives of: a) text classification to mine disease-related information and main concerns of patients, and; b) topic modeling to identify the major issues of public health. This proposal supports the BCCDC impact goals which include informing health policy and design of health services to improve health of British Columbians by enhancing population health monitoring and evaluation.