Data Science Tools and Adoption for Health and Beyond

The Policy Lab is a Data Sciences Institute (DSI) collaboration with the Dalla Lana School of Public Health (DLSPH). The Policy Lab works with ministries, agencies, and other policy-oriented groups to build capacity and demand across the public sector for data science insights in the health sector. Our goal is to start to foster a strong community of data scientists and data science users and increase the use of data sciences in the design and development of policy to create healthier and more just societies. We also undertook specific projects to define the context better and understand barriers to overcome to enable data science capacity in public sector organizations. The insights developed from this initial work in public health and health systems will support work on data sciences and public policy across sectors and ensure that our capacity-building approaches meet the needs of complex policy environments.

The objectives of the Data Science Tools and Adoption for Health and Beyond Workshop are to:

Bring together an engaged group of individuals interested in advanced data science capacity in public sector organizations.
Present and discuss what data science means for public sector organizations
Share the outcomes of the Policy Lab.
Present compelling data science use cases motivated by real-world examples and results from the DSI-DLSPH policy study of public sector organizations for learning and discussion.
Present and receive feedback on a data science toolkit designed specifically for public sector health organizations and
Discuss and engage across public sector organizations to discuss opportunities to work together to build capacity and define data science needs.

May 15, 2024 10am -2pm
In-person
DSI 10th floor Seminar Room, 700 University Avenue

Register Here

Stay tuned for upcoming events

May 15, 2024
10:00 - 10:10 am	Welcome and opening Lisa Strug, Director, Data Sciences Institute, University of Toronto Steini Brown, Dean, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto
10:10 - 10:20 am	Introduction to the DSI- DLSPH Policy Lab and Activities Laura Rosella, Co-Chair Policy Lab, and Associate Director, Education & Training, Data Sciences Institute, University of Toronto Michael Hillmer, Co-Chair Policy Lab, and Assistant Deputy Minister, Digital and Analytics Strategy, Ontario Ministry of Health/Ministry of Long-Term Care
10:20 - 11:00 am	Presentations on Case Studies and Key Informant Interviews, DSI-DSLPH Researchers-in-Residence Tina Badiani Steven Habbous Jeremy Herring
11:00 - 11:45 am	Facilitated Tabletop Discussion: How to build data science functionality in public sector organizations Overcoming barriers Talent Infrastructure
11:45 - 12:45 pm	Networking lunch
12:45 - 1:15 pm	Discussion: Education/Capacity Building Upskilling and training for leaders and existing staff Curriculum
1:15 - 1:45 pm	Data Science Toolkit for Public Sector Health Organizations Tina Badiani Steven Habbous Jeremy Herring
1:45 - 2:00 pm	Expanding to other policy domains & next steps (All)

Previous CQSS Blitz Workshops

February 16, 2023
9:30-10:00 am	Coffee/pastries
10:00-10:15 am	Welcome Angelina Grigoryeva, Department of Sociology, University of Toronto Scarborough
10:15-10:30 am	Using AI to investigate the effects of central Bank Communications: It’s not just what they, say but how they say it! Michelle Alexopoulos, Department of Economics, Faculty of Arts & Science
10:30-10:45 am	Social Media Content Recommendation as a Social Process Peter Marbach, Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Arts & Science
10:45-11:00 am	MIMIC-IV, publicly available critical care data for research Alistair Johnson, Child Health Evaluative Sciences, The Hospital for Sick Children, and Biostatistics, Dalla Lana School of Public Health
11:00-11:15 am	Break
11:15-11:30 am	Social and Behavioural Determinants of Health in Prognostic Machine Learning Models for Patient Outcome Prediction Zahra Shakeri, Dalla Lana School of Public Health
11:30-11:45 am	How can tools from NLP help us understand human language processing? Shohini Bhattasali, Department of Language Studies, University of Toronto Scarborough
11:45-noon	New Money in the New Economy: The Shift to Stock-Based Compensation and U.S. Wealth Inequality Angelina Grigoryeva, Department of Sociology, University of Toronto Scarborough
noon-1:30 pm	Networking Lunch
1:30-1:45 pm	Infairness: Algorithmic bias evaluation and mitigation for large unlabeled datasets with broad application Jessica Gronsbell, Department of Statistical Sciences, Faculty of Arts & Science
1:45-2:00 pm	Adaptive Experimentation to Improve Happiness and Well-being Sofia Panasiuk, Dana Kulzhabayeva, and Nathan Laundry, Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Arts & Science
2:00-2:15 pm	Macroscopic Models of Equity Markets and Portfolio Selection Ting Kam Leonard Wong, Department of Statistical Sciences, Faculty of Arts & Science
2:15-2:30 pm	Wrap up

Speaker

Lisa Strug
Director, Data Sciences Institute, University of Toronto

Lisa Strug is a Professor in the Departments of Statistical Sciences, Computer Science and cross-appointed in Biostatistics at the University of Toronto and is a Senior Scientist in the Program in Genetics and Genome Biology at the Hospital for Sick Children. She holds several other leadership positions at the University of Toronto including the Director of the Canadian Statistical Sciences Institute Ontario Region (CANSSI Ontario), and at the Hospital for Sick Children as Associate Director of the Centre for Applied Genomics and the Lead of the Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Gene Modifier Consortium and the Biology of Juvenile Myoclonic Epilepsy International Consortium. She is a statistical geneticist and her research focuses on the development of novel statistical approaches to analyze and integrate multi-omics data to identify genetic contributors to complex human disease. She has received several honours including the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Genome Data Science.

Adalstein Brown
Professor and Dean, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto

Adalsteinn (Steini) Brown is the Dean of the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. Past roles include Director of the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation at the University of Toronto, Assistant Deputy Minister for Strategy in the Ontario Ministry of Health and Assistant Deputy Minister for Science and Research at the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation. Prior to these roles he worked in start-ups in New York, California and elsewhere. He is a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Oxford. He is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences. developing novel systems and running usability studies. Currently, works on projects at the intersection of programming, AI, and HCI, such as how new AI capabilities can help us reimagine the practice of programming. He works on LLM evaluation tooling, through high-visibility open-source projects such as ChainForge. His first-authored papers have won awards at top HCI conferences, including at CHI, CSCW, and UIST.

Tina Badiani
Policy Lab, Data Sciences Institute Researcher-in-Residence

Tina Badiani has over 20 years of work experience in public health in Ontario at both the provincial and local levels.  She has held a number of different epidemiologist, manager and associate director/director level positions at the Ontario Ministry of Health, Public Health Ontario (PHO) and Toronto Public Health (TPH).  Highlights from her career include providing epidemiologic leadership for outbreak investigations, including SARS, the H1N1 pandemic, and a large number of foodborne illness outbreaks; serving as the Surveillance Lead for the 2015 Pan/Parapan Am Games; developing PHO’s first infectious disease surveillance strategy; leading the planning and delivery of the annual provincial conference The Ontario Public Health Convention; and providing data management leadership as part of TPH’s COVID-19 response.  She is trained as an epidemiologist and has experience working at the international level

Steven Habbous
Policy Lab, Data Sciences Institute Researcher-in-Residence
Lead Methodologist, Strategic Analytics, Ontario Health

Dr. Steven Habbous received a PhD in Epidemiology at Western University where he studied the efficiency of the living kidney donor evaluation process. He then worked at Ontario Health (Cancer Care Ontario) examining the burden of an array of cancers in the province. Much of this work involved examining temporal and special trends in incidence, diagnosis, and treatment, and finding opportunities for quality improvement. Since 2022, Steven has joined the Strategic Analytics team at Ontario Health, providing insights across the health care system more broadly. By evaluating the impact, the COVID-19 pandemic has had on the Ontario healthcare system, opportunities for quality improvement have emerged. Examples include transitioning care from the inpatient to the outpatient setting, measuring quality of care, and empowering the organization by leveraging available data to generate insights. Steven loves telling stories with data to improve patient outcomes and optimize efficiency.

Jeremy Herring
Policy Lab, Data Sciences Institute Researcher-in-Residence

Jeremy Herring is an epidemiologist lead within the Analytic Services team at Public Health Ontario (PHO). His work at PHO includes designing interactive dashboards and reports using key public health indicators, as well as providing scientific and technical advice to public health stakeholders in local and provincial government. He holds a B.Sc. in Health Sciences from Brock University and an M.Sc. in Epidemiology and Biostatistics from the University of Western Ontario.

Michael Hillmer
Assistant Deputy Minister,
Digital and Analytics Strategy,
Ontario Ministry of Health/Ministry of Long-Term Care

Dr. Michael Hillmer is an Assistant Deputy Minister in the Ontario Ministries of Health and Long-Term Care where he is responsible for digital health, data, and analytics. Previously, he worked at the federal level and in the private sector. He is an associate professor in the Institute for Health Policy, Management, and Evaluation at the University of Toronto, He attended Carleton University and the University of Toronto.

Laura Rosella
Co-Chair Policy Lab
Associate Director, Education & Training, Data Sciences Institute, University of Toronto
Professor, Dalla Lana School of Public Health and Faculty of Medicine Department of Laboratory Medicine & Pathobiology, University of Toronto

Laura Rosella is an epidemiologist and Professor in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto, where she holds a Canada Research Chair in Population Health Analytics and Stephen Family Chair in Community Health. Her research interests include population health and population-based risk tools to support public health planning and public health policy. She holds Scientific Appointments at Vector, Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology, and ICES. Dr. Rosella has training in statistics, epidemiology, and Public Health Policy.